Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, Associate Editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Hi my name's Toby Young.

I'm an associate editor of Quillett based in London.

And today I'm talking to Jonathan Rausch.

Jonathan is the author of several books including The Happiness Curve,

Why Life Gets Better After 50, Gay Marriage,

Why It's Good for Gays, Good for Straits and Good for America,

and perhaps the book he's most famous for Kindly Inquisitor's the new attacks on

free thought which was published in 1993 and then updated in 2013. Jonathan has a new

book out which is sort of a sequel to Kindly Inquisitors called the Constitution of Knowledge.

Jonathan, welcome to the Colette Podcast.

Tell us about the Constitution of Knowledge.

This is a new book on the attacks on our system that converts information into knowledge and disagreement into facts, which I call the Constitution of knowledge.

Subtitle is a defensive truth, because this a system that that helps us distinguish truth

from falsehood on a social scale and it's come under attack from a number of

different directions one of them is social coercion which people have called cancel culture, where activists have discovered that they can intimidate dissenters and manipulate the information environment in that way.

...