Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillett.

Quillett is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week's guest is

one of my favorite newspaper columnists, Pamela Paul of the New York Times. She writes lots of great

columns but the one that really caught my eye was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek

June 20 article titled No I Don't Want to Protest which for me summed up my own feelings about

standing around in the sun or rain and shouting simplistic slogans at people about

Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Gaza or whatnot.

Now the obvious backdrop to this are the anti-Israel protest encampments

scattered around North American university campuses.

But as Pamela makes clear, her antipathy to protest extends beyond putting on a kaffia and bleeding from the river to the sea.

The experience can be tedious and sometimes even dangerous, and you spend a lot of time wondering when you're going to be

able to wander off and go to the bathroom. Anyway without further ado I give you Miss

Pamela Paul. Pamela thanks so much for being on the Colette Podcast, a big fan.

Thank you, delighted to be here.

Okay, so this felt like the kind of column that maybe you'd wanted to write for a long time and then you finally wrote it?

So actually I very often will write columns ahead of time and in fact I had filed my column for that week

and I was driving in my car and just had this sudden idea

of writing about protests from this very different angle,

which is to say first person pretty ironic satirical

...