Media Storm - AC Grayling: Free speech, Wokeism, and how to save democracy

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

How do we 'cancel' Fascism without censorship? Can we protect free speech as well as fact-checking? This week, something different: we dive deep into social justice theory and question how to actually achieve it. Media Storm brings missing expert voices into the conversation. These are normally people with lived experience, but as politics becomes evermore polarised, we sought out a world-class philosopher to help us rise above partisanship and understand the core questions driving division. AC Grayling is Master of the New College of the Humanities and has written and edited over 30 books. But he does not see philosophy as an ivory tower practice, rather a useful subject for real life implementation. We put that to the test. The episode is produced and presented by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall). The music is by Samfire (@soundofsamfire). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Calling all Booklovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd.

Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at dynamic.ca slash active. Welcome, Mediastormers. Today we are having a deep dive into free speech. the philosophy behind it, and how we can consistently apply that wherever we stand on the political

spectrum. We have a very special guest, but first, I want to read you my pitch to him, because it's a slightly unusual take for Media Storm, but I hope you'll be behind it. Media Storm brings missing expert voices into the conversation. These are generally people most affected by the story from underrepresented communities. But as free speech becomes hotly contested in current affairs, I see non-partisan, philosophical experts, as the voices we should be hearing from more. Which is why I reached out to this guest. The free speech tug of war between left and right wing leaders is at the forefront of politics today, with each side seeking to silence disagreeable views, while claiming to champion human rights on the one hand

and personal liberties on the other. The definition of free speech today has become so politicised. I see value in reorienting it around timeless and non-partisan philosophical theory. I wanted to do this as well because lately I've spotted possible inconsistencies in my own philosophy of free speech, where I see its value, where I see its limits, when I apply it to different political contexts. So listeners, I want you to listen introspectively, especially when you disagree. A little note, you will hear philosophers mentioned by name, but you do not need to recognize the names or remember them to follow all the main takeaways. Time to welcome our guest. Our guest today is philosopher, AC Grayling.

broadly speaking, a proponent of free speech, but with careful consideration. He has written and edited over 30 books, was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck before becoming master of the new college of the humanities in London. He's also a fellow at Oxford University. But he does not see philosophy as an ivory tower practice, rather a useful one. And so today he will be grounding his theory for us in the current affairs troubling many. A.C. Grayling, welcome to Media Storm. Hi, Mitchell.

I want to start by looking at, the self-branded free speech absolutist currently in the White House, President Donald Trump. Trump campaigned while in opposition, largely on the mantra of free speech absolutism. This is founded, broadly speaking, in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and his On Liberty essay published in 1859. His idea of free speech revolves around the harm principle that adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the process. However, since we've seen President Trump come in, while he has abolished what he saw as censorship in some respects, he has introduced it in others, particularly when it comes to the case of student protesters defending the rights of Palestinians. He has detained and sought to deport migrant students for their thoughts, for their speech around Palestine, and his constitutional justification for this is that migrants are not entitled.

to the same free speech rights as civilians that they are in the country on the condition that they comply with national values. What do you make of this argument? Well, I mean, it's a load of rubbish, of course. The great champions or would-be champions of free speech now really mean the freedom to say which you like without consequences. And in fact, it's a kind of irony that that other great champion of free speech,

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, claiming that he was going to do. be defending freedom of expression has chucked me off it. So there you go. Great example of free speech and action there. I mean, the point about this, and go back to John St. Stuart Mill, whom you referenced there, there is a big debate about what harm is

and what forms it might take, physical harm. And that, of course, you know, is right in front of our noses when we think about incitement to riot or to hatred or to attack people or lynch mob style events. but it does actually imply psychological and economic and other social harms as well. And that in turn implies that freedom of expression is not something that fails to have consequences obviously for the speaker as well as for other people who might in some way or be affected by freedom of expression.

So really key point to make is this. Freedom of expression is absolutely fundamental to the health of a society, but it is not unqualified. So it's fundamental because you cannot have legal process without it. You can't accuse and defend. You can't have politics without it because you can't propose public policy ideas and challenge them and explore them. Can't have education worth the name without it because you can't put forward ideas and discuss them and dig into them. You can't have creativity, the arts, without it. So it's absolutely fundamental. Without it, a society begins to wither and shrink and die. But it's not unqualified for precisely the reason you mentioned,

and that is that it has consequences. Everybody knows the example of not shouting fire in a crowded theatre. That's a very, very obvious kind of case. And societies do recognise the need sometimes to limit freedom of expression. For example, in time of war, you don't want your newspapers printing stuff that the enemy might find useful. So it's not unqualified. We might decide that there are certain kinds of speech, racist speech, for example, hate speech of any kind, that we just simply don't want to hear. And the society itself might go as far as legislating against that. Well, take the case of Germany. I mean, Germany with its great reckoning with history with the Nazi period in Germany, they ban any kind of, you know, adherence to Nazism

or Holocaust denial. And they're doing it because this is a society that has really had to face up to something and change dramatically, and it wants to shape and direct itself in a way that will avoid that recurring, because these things do recur, and we see plenty of evidence of that with the upsurge of the right wing everywhere in the world. And so in that kind of case, you can see that the idea of qualifying freedom of expression can be justified, but it really needs a very, very good justification, and it has to be very specific to a purpose, because otherwise, as I say, the fundamental importance of it to all those different spheres is something that we simply cannot ignore.

But is it a suitable justification or is it not a suitable justification to say that people who are coming to our country on visas have certain conditions attached to those visas and those conditions may include subscribing broadly to national values. and if they say something that is considered an existential threat to those national values, as Trump has declared the support of pro-Palestine protesters, have they not breached those conditions? Can we not restrict their free speech on different terms to citizens? No.

What we expect of immigrants is that they'll abide by the laws of the land. What we do when we say they've got to sign up to our values, quote, unquote, you have immediately to ask whose values. I mean, after all, a society is a very diverse thing and there have lots of different opinions about lots of different things and that diversity is in fact a good thing. They have lots of difference of opinions,

lots of different perspectives. It's very healthy for the society. And if you want to impose uniform values on the society to which everybody has to subscribe, then you're going to get the problem that every form of nationalism, every form of imposed ideology creates. You know, when you look at sort of right-wing nationalism,

what you see is an attempt to impose unity on the society, unity of behavior or of belief of values. But in fact, it's not unity that we should be striving for in a society. It's harmony. Not unity, but harmony. Harmony which recognizes diversities, encourages debate and discussion, but in a civilized way.

The form should be civil, the content should be as diverse as you like, so that even in the case of people who have very horrible ideas, much, much better that they express those ideas and then we defeat those ideas with better free speech than that we drive them underground or shut them up. Because if you do that, then the likelihood is that eventually in their frustration they're going to set off a bomb. But doesn't Trump's fiddling with free speech show the inherent weaknesses in the assumptions behind free speech? Karl Marx thought that liberal rights tended to preserve the interests of an individualistic bourgeoisie rather than the permanent interests of humanity. In a society where the general population has often been indoctrinated or manipulated by those who control the media, free speech may simply serve the interests of the powerful, which is not a dissimilar outcome to censorship in a totalitarian system.

society. Trump has tightened the control of the presidency over the media. He's dismissed certain media outlets from access to the White House for not complying with his chosen language. Meanwhile, he's got social media owners, Musk and Zuckerberg largely in his pocket. Isn't this proof that Karl Marx's concerns are material? Well, Karl Marx lived at a time when the prevailing, a long prevailing situation, namely that the only people who had free expression were people who owned the means of expression. And pretty well everybody else's voices were silence because they didn't have a platform. They didn't have access to it. What we see happening in the US today is that the people in power and the people with money want to reassert that situation. The great

sort of anti-woke endeavor, which is going on in the states at the moment, is a reaction to the fact that since the middle of the last century, all those groups that were so deeply disadvantaged in society, so African Americans, for example, and women and gays and people like that who, from the 1560s onwards, really started to fight for their rights. They had, prior to that time, not even the right to seek their rights. I mean, they were absolutely shut up and they had no platform at all. So what the Trumpists are worried about is that other people using their freedom of expression feel like a threat to their interests.

Now, there's just something really key about that, which is that people asserting their rights are threatening other people's interests, not other people's rights, but other people's interests. And to shut up the people who are challenging you is the very first move that you would make, and that's what we see happening there. What the Trumpists want is the ability, A,

for them to have the major, if not the, only outlet for expression, and B, to be able to express themselves without consequences, without comeback. The other concern that I have with this idea of free speech as unregulated as possible is that it presumes Mills' idea of a free speech marketplace, as if we exist in a marketplace of ideas where people can equally express their views civilly and can. coherently and then the best speech, the truest speech, will win out. But that is not what we see in reality. Actually, what we see, particularly in the news industry, is that fake news spreads much faster

than the truth. And it's incredibly difficult to falsify a lie once it has gone viral. We saw the consequences of this last year in the UK. We had summer riots after the Southport stabbing was falsely tied to a fictional asylum seeker who had come to the UK on a digital. dingy. This was not true. And yet, by the time the police had sought to amend it, there were already riots on the street, people storming the streets and attacking anyone they perceived to be a migrant. How do we protect free speech in an environment where the lie catches faster than the truth? Well, you identify a serious problem here, which is, of course, the one exacerbated by social media, where things can go viral, where the zone is flooded with a lot of misinformation.

and so on. So it is a desperately difficult situation. Really, the best pushback to it is to try to to encourage everybody to start thinking slow. Now, I'm quoting here, Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast and slow. So his idea was that most people are page one of Mr. Google. You know, the very first thing that they come across, so the first thing they see on social media is the thing that they believe, they take it to face value. And they don't ask that absolutely key question. which is, really, and then dig into the evidence a little bit, and ask if that really makes sense and try to get a better perspective. It's not only the responsibility of the mainstream media and all their different forms

to try to be as factual and fact-checking as possible, but it's also a responsibility of each of us individually in society to be thoughtful about these things, to be aware of the danger of virality and social media, and of the fact that there are bad actors, out there who want to distort and deflect what happens in society. Now, I know this sounds like, well, hang on, you know, this is a bit long term, isn't it, doesn't address the immediate problem? So one way of addressing the immediate problem is, in my own view, we should just get rid of anonymity on social media.

If everybody posted under their own name, transparently, this would clean up a heck of a lot of the bad stuff that goes on. Aren't there situations where anonymity would undermine free speech? for example, if you live in a state where there is censorship and you could be targeted for being politically outspoken, for example, refugees or people who are stateless and don't have access to identification. Oh, yes, I agree. And in fact, we've got to find an intelligent way to deal with it. But you know what? The cost that society is paying at the moment for abuse of social media is just too great. The default should be if you're going to put an opinion out there or make a claim

or state something as a fact into the public domain. You've got to do it in your own person, your proper person. We've got to know who you are so that you can be held accountable for the consequences of your freedom of expression. What do you think then of the idea of fact checkers on social media? We used to have these in place. Elon Musk, when he took over Twitter and rebranded at X, he said that these fact checkers essentially operated as tools for the

mostly liberal-leaning people who work at social media organizations to control the speech of people who they disagree with. He has scrapped these fact-checkers. Mark Zuckerberg has followed his example after pressure from Donald Trump. But on Facebook, those fact-checkers were originally brought in in response to incidents of genocide incitement, for example, in Myanmar. Do you think that these fact-checkers are a good idea to regulate free speech, Or do you fear that they actually would be weaponised to sort of lean the conversation towards a political direction?

Well, I do think they're a good idea. And the point about the people who are doing the fact checking is that people in that role ought to be people who are publicly known to be in that role. So there is a sort of wider accountability for them. So that's one solution. Another very good solution is that if there were. forms of, I don't quite know how to describe them, not being a very techy person, but the sort of software that you could buy, which overlies what happens on social media and generally on the internet, and sort of alerts you to alternative views or to other sources of information.

And this filter will not be telling us what to think, but it will be saying, oh, right, okay, so this report came from so and so, well, this is discussed in that newspaper and that magazine and that internet site and help you to navigate your vision and look for alternatives. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a heck of a lot better than the situation now, which is that something pops up on social media, you might believe it, and you might act accordingly. Let's take a quick break. When you support Movember, you're not just fundraising.

You're showing up for the men you love. your dad, your brother, your partner, your friends. It isn't just a men's issue. It's a human one. That's why Movember exists to change the face of men's health. From mental health and suicide prevention to prostate and testicular cancer research and early detection, Movember is tackling the biggest health issues facing men today. Join the movement and donate now at Movember.com.

The Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus.

Welcome back. I want to turn the split. what like now, onto the other end of the political spectrum, the so-called liberal lefties, groups I have been, you know, associate I would probably be seen to belong to by lots, that condemn student protest shutdowns in the US. But they have drawn condemnation themselves for council culture and for the no-platforming movement, for example,

where they would protest, say, universities or platforming people they see as having dangerous or harmful views. Let's start with no-platforming. you're pretty wary of this, I gather. How so? Well, so a number of different things here and a prefatory remark is required here. I would also regard myself as a liberal lefty

to the extent that I'm a bit of a pro-wokist, okay, I'm sort of on the side of the work causes. And don't forget, by the way, on the right-hand side of this debate, on the far right of it, you've got neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, masculists, I mean, really dreadful people, and it's a feature of the tremendous success of the right

in demonizing wokeism that all the concentration is on the wokeists and on cancel culture and stuff. Digging into what really underlies the whole woke wars thing, one sees that it is part of this great reckoning with history, the civil rights movement, the gay movement, the second wave feminism. It's all part of the same story. And today's wokenism is is another chapter in that story. And that story is about pushing back against discrimination. It's about fighting racism. It's fighting sexism. It's fighting homophobia, ageism, disabalism. It's about saying every individual, just quay individual, has a right to a fair and included place in society. That's what really underlies the work issues. And if you can

dig down beneath all the, you know, the rubbish and the hysteria that comes out of the daily telegraph every day about, you know, people being woke, and see that, then you see what's at stake, and it really is very important. So to put into context what it is that people are trying to do, in this talk about what people should be sort of allowed to say in given settings, the argument is put, and I think it has a certain value to it, that no platforming, for example, is not so much and shouldn't be about canceling people groups, but why should we give him a platform? So it's about the institution and not the person.

But connected to that, of course, is the whole issue of cancel culture. And I point out, in a recent book on the matter, I point out that the whole of history is about one group trying to cancel another group. That's what war is. It's one side trying to cancel the other side. We cancelled criminals by locking them up in prison. Oscar Wilde was a victim of cancel culture. Osama bin Laden was a victim of cancel culture in a way that the United States of America, which before Trump saw itself as a place where the rule of law and respect for human rights was taken seriously. According to those principles, he should have been arrested and put on trial, not extrajudiciously murdered and dumped into the Arabian Gulf. Anyway, so you can see that

in this tangle of issues, the real question is about how you do things. And if you do things by due process, then you get a far better result than if you allow lynch mobs and pylons, social media pylons, people constituting themselves, prosecutor, judge and jury. And that's what happens sometimes in sort of canceling endeavors over people who may actually merit canceling. But even in those cases, there should be a due process. Ultimately, justice is the ultimate decency in society, and it's injustice always as going to wrangle and poison things. And therefore, however we go about dealing, even with the worst

of what crops up in society, we should try to do it on the basis of just principles. On the basis of just principles, states do generally implement some level of censorship. For example, when it comes to national security concerns or online material that could be harmful to children. But what about the slippery slope argument? And I want to return to an example you mentioned yourself earlier, which is how in Germany there are bans on minimizing the crimes of the Nazi Third Reich, same as in Austria. And this has at times backfired. There is the now discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, who in a libel trial

lost when he sued the historian Deborah Lipstad for accusing him of being a Holocaust denier. and that tasked her legal team, not just with proving he was a Holocaust denier, but proving that the Holocaust had happened. This was, I suppose, an example of Mills' free marketplace of ideas. Two sides were heard, and the better side won. But when, in 2006, he arrived in Austria, and he was arrested and imprisoned under Austrian laws

that criminalised minimizing the crimes of the Third Reich, there was a backlash, and he sort of became something of a free speech martyr. He was later invited to Oxford University to speak about free speech. Similarly, just recently, the AFD, the far right party in Germany, some of whose members have been convicted under these laws, they were almost banned last month when German intelligence declared the AFD to be an extremist organisation. Under German law, this opens the door for them to be banned as a party.

But the German government almost immediately rolled back because they were accused with seeking to censor their own. opposition. So censorship often backfires when imposed by the state. However, this is a context in which we have seen Nazi ideas take hold of a democratic society, have win that free speech challenge. And we have said never again. How do we prevent fascism taking over society again without imposing censorship? Well, it's a very good question. And it allets us, of course, to the fact that there are places where very special circumstances obtain. And Germany and Austria are perfect examples of this.

After all, in the longer view of history, 70 years is not a very long time. And the generations that immediately follow something like the Third Reich will still be dealing with it and the fallout from it in just a way, for example, that people of color in the Caribbean and North America. America still dealing with a fallout from slavery. So, you know, these consequences resonate on and special things have to be done. You might say that affirmative action in the U.S. was one special measure taken to try to address some of the distortions that the historical events preceding them had introduced. And it's a kind of parallel case, therefore, to the

German and Austrian case. So there are circumstances there and there are good and strong arguments for doing something particular. Because after all, every society is a continual negotiation. It's a continual self-negotiation in a way. It sort of pollulates with different points of view and tensions and everybody trying to work out what's acceptable and not. The pendulum sometimes swings too far. There's no question about it. And all this is just a symptom of a great truth, which is that nothing is perfect anywhere. And everything is always is going to be a matter of, you know, patch and mend and go as you do it in society, which takes effort, by the way.

That old cliche thing about the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and everything is absolutely true. I mean, you've got to keep engaged and you've got to keep thinking about how to try to work these things out. So the situation that you raised there, the idea that censorship can indeed backfire, yes, I mean, we experiment and we fail and then, you know, it's an ongoing endeavor. Couldn't so-called cancel culture kind of be a counterpoint to that? Where there is territory onto which states should not encroach and state censorship can be very dangerous, isn't community censorship a preferable option?

Because some people would call cancel culture consequence culture. You have free speech to say what you want, but not without facing the consequences, not without facing those you anger or harm. Couldn't we seek cancel culture in that way? Yes, indeed, I mean, and indeed I think I was kind of reaching for that point earlier on when I said that counselling can indeed be justified, so social censure. The net sometimes gets cast too wide and individuals get caught up in it and branded in a way that makes it very difficult for them to sort of come back. But, you know, that has to be allowed in a society. You've got to allow for the possibility of reform and reparation. Indeed, our whole criminal justice system is predicated on the idea.

that imprisoning people is not only about protecting society, but it's also about trying to find an opportunity, of course, an opportunity very rarely realized because it's so underfunded and so on, for people to get an opportunity to reset and to come back into society, having paid their dues. Right. So you can see that there are cases where canceling somebody or something is protective. It protects against harm being done to others. And you can see a some cancelling endeavours as being, in fact, discriminatory. So Trump is cancelling critical waste theory and people who teach it and so on, and that is discriminatory cancelling.

And there, when you make that distinction between protective and discriminatory, you see that a better case can be made for the former than the latter, obviously. But I repeat the point that any kind of cancelling has to be predicated on a due process, because without it, it's unjust and injustices are toxic. Thank you. Now, I want to slightly change tack, zoom out a little. This podcast discussion is partially me seeking to re-root the free speech debate around human philosophy rather than partisan politics. But is that a futile exercise?

Can we ever separate philosophical theories from the context in which their form, Is there a philosophy that can apply in a vacuum? So I suppose the answer to your question is the great philosophical answer, which is yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense that you can be more detached and reflective and non-party political partisan, but pretty well everything is politics. It doesn't have to be party politics, that's the point.

I think that duty on us to try to be intelligent. Do you remember T.S. Eliot said there is, one method for everything, and that is be intelligent. Then you see that not absolutely everything people on the other side of the political argument say is nonsense. I mean, philosophical reflection ought to be such that you examine assumptions, you try to stand back for many personal preferences, you try to look at arguments and really understand them. Indeed, to refute an argument, you need to understand it thoroughly, and you need to understand it in a way which is intellectually generous, as well as rationally intellectual.

So all those things said, you get the yes part of the answer, which is, yes, we can detach philosophical reflection, reflection on principles from party politics, certainly. The no part comes, I suppose, when you go from nosis to praxis, when you try to go from reflection to putting these things to work actually in concrete terms in society. And there, of course, you're going to immediately meet that entity which Winston Churchill once remarked was an embodiment of the proof of the weakness of democracy, and that is the human individual. You've grown up in various, very different political contexts, I believe this includes pre-independent Zambia at the time, northern Rhodesia. Do you think that the different political context to which you've been exposed have influenced your theory on freedom and philosophy in general?

So I was a kid during the last gasp of the colonialism in Africa there. That had a big effect on me socially because I was in fact brought up by, even to use the word now sounds dreadful, but our servants, one of whom was sort of particularly important in my life because he was the person I was closest to in the family. I used to have night terrors when I was a little kid and this guy Johnny Penza, his name, was he used to come and sleep lying on the floor next to my bed

just to keep me company. And when I went off to a boarding school at the age of eight, he was the, or they, the happy, lovely people in the back half of the house for the people I missed not the people behind their newspapers was in the front half of that. So racism, the way in which they were treated, my mother was a horrible racist, and the whole setup was, you know, something that imprinted itself very early. And I've always been incredibly allergic to racism as a result of that. But I was back

in the UK, you know, as a teenager, I tell people that I have very, very often been a member of the Labour Party, which tells you how often I've resigned from it and discussed it's something But anyway, party politics, party politics, where, you know, in deference to the fact that you have to harvest as many votes for your cause as possible, and therefore you have to discipline the party and therefore members of the party have to be representatives of the party line and not of the interests of constituents or the country as a whole. I mean, this is distorted and the toxified government. if government is just turned into politics, if that's all it is, and just look at PMQs, you know, on the radio, Prime Minister's questions, you just see that it's party political campaigning all the time. And that's not good government. And good government should be dedicated to the interest of all the people. I mean, never forget that that famous definition of democracy by Lincoln, government of the people, by the people, for the people, equivocates on the word people in all three.

cases. Government of the people, that's everybody, slave and free, man, woman, child, etc. By the people? Well, who are the people who constituted the government? White men who own property? That was a very small proportion of the overall population. For the people? Well, obviously for the people who vote for you and donate money to your political party because you want to serve their interests so that you can be re-elected again. So three different people. And as a result, it doesn't serve the people. Think of it. Nearly 70% of people, voted in the last election for somebody other than a Labour MP. We have a Labour government now with a very, very large majority.

It makes you think that things are just going wrong with the process, and so we need to address that. And I'm sure, for example, that if we did have, let us say, a PR system, a system where the diversity of interests get something of a voice in our society, more people would be engaged. Maybe the Parliament, here one is being a bit optimistic, but what's the alternative for optimism? Maybe they would be more responsive to the diversity of needs and interests in society. And maybe we wouldn't be doing utterly stupid things like Brexit and the rest of it.

I'm aware we're down to our final minute, but I did want to ask one more question, which is that you have very generously given Media Storm your time this morning. And I wondered, what made you accept my invitation today? Well, there's always, you know, a chance that one might be able to say something using one's freedom of expression to do so. And just hope that it might, you know, might strike a match and set a light. Starch fire. Well, thank you so much, Aisy Grayling, for joining us. just before we lose you.

You mentioned another recent book. I wondered if there was anything that you would like to plug to our listeners or anywhere you can signal to listeners that they can follow up. Always happy to give a plug. So the recently published book is called Discriminations, subtitle Making Peace in the Culture Wars. And it's all about the issues we've been talking about really about council culture and wokeism.

It's a kind of defence of woken. And I have another book coming out this year, It seems a bit excessive, but at any rate, it is called for the people. So it's a discussion of that equivocation on people. And it's an analysis of why, just at the moment, democracy as a concept is, you know, people seem to be losing a bit of faith in it. It's an analysis of why that's happening and why it's important to defend it. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for listening. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon. for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout-outs to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode,

please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helen Awadier, and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod.

MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wardia and Matilda Malinson. Music is by Samphire.