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. You can support our podcast by

visiting Patreon.com forward slash quillet and becoming a monthly patron. By

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Welcome to this bonus Monday edition of the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

Back in January, I interviewed American journalist Jesse Single about his controversial and authoritative Atlantic magazine article entitled

When Children Say They're Transgender.

In that interview, we discussed the substance of Jesse's article, but also some of the

blowback he's received from critics who took issue with his approach.

But it turns out that Jesse has received more online abuse than he led on at the time.

Last week, in a new article posted to his own website,

Jesse describes how a campaign of character assassination is that this campaign against Jesse was led in part by a well-known journalist for slate.com,

Nicole Cliff. And what's more, this isn't the only time that Cliff has used Twitter

to launch bizarre, unsubstantiated, or even plain out false claims about public

figures. In recent days, she subjected actor Jeff Goldblum to the same treatment, tantalizing

her followers with vague claims of sexual misconduct,

claims that as of this recording she has yet to explain. Our Colette podcast usually is released at the end of each week,

but the chance to speak with

Jesse about all this was too good to pass up. So please enjoy the short bonus

...