Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like toTuesday November 19th, 2019
London-based public intellectual Douglas Murray is in Montreal this week to promote his new book. I was afforded the luxury of a rambling conversation over coffee with him about The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.A “clubbable conservative,” as one reviewer accurately describes him, Murray hit his intellectual stride early, publishing his first book at 18, which attr...
Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From SchoolsMonday November 18th, 2019
The Greater Essex County District School Board in the Windsor, Ont., area is supplanting its grade 11 literature curriculum, which up to now has featured great writers of the western canon such as Shakespeare and George Orwell, with a year-long program of Indigenous writers. The change has already been effected in eight of the district’s 15 schools.
In the Peel district as well, I am info...
Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head at McGill UniversityThursday November 14th, 2019
Anti-Semitism is an escalating global problem, and no objective observer denies it. There are many contributing factors, but a common two-ply thread is the demonization of the state of Israel as an all-evil oppressor and the Palestinians as an all-innocent oppressed people. The obsession rises to its crescendo on university campuses, where fulltime hate-fuelled activists plow their Israel-deleg...
Kay: Anti-Semitism is back in BerlinThursday November 14th, 2019
We recently commemorated Kristallnacht, history’s most consequential pogrom. The Night of Broken Glass swept Germany over Nov. 9-10, 1938, resulting in 91 deaths, countless other Jews abused and 1,000 synagogues destroyed. Jewish homes and businesses were looted and defiled. More than 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. German anti-Semitism was revealed in all its unfiltered vir...
Free speech in Canada: It was bad five years ago. Do you think it’s gotten better since?Wednesday November 13th, 2019
Is free speech under attack, on Canadian campuses and in society at large? The National Post has a new documentary exploring this very issue. In the coming weeks, a series of essays in these pages will explore that same issue. Today, Barbara Kay examines “cancel culture” on Canadian campuses. To view the documentary, please go to NationalPost.com/freespeech.What is behind cancel culture on c...
Supplanting literary classics with native literature is a disservice to studentsTuesday November 5th, 2019
Some years ago, the late, great writer George Jonas asked me about my intellectual influences. Who did I remember as especially formative? Oh, George Orwell, of course. I read Animal Farm in my mid-teens, 1984 a little later, and most of his other writings over the course of my salad years. It would be hard to overstate his effect on my understanding of concepts like “freedom,” &...
HOW DARE YOU: Professor turfed after telling inconvenient climate truthMonday November 4th, 2019
In 2011, London’s National Theatre mounted a play, The Heretic, by Richard Bean, that had the hot topic of climate change as its driving theme. His protagonist is a respected academic in the earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university, Dr. Diane Cassell. Her specialty is the measurement of sea levels in the Maldives.
Can you already see where this is going? Bet you can, and...
Climate hypocrisy rules the day with jet-setting liberal influencersThursday October 31st, 2019
Polls show that people are a lot more concerned about climate change than they used to be. But are they responding to actual evidence of climate change, or the constant harangues at them by Chicken Little politicians and cultural influencers desperate to prove their Gaia-reverent, politically correct credentials?
My own skepticism is buttressed when, for example, I see the Obama family p...
Dems need to go beyond Twitter if they don’t want four more years of ‘crazy’Tuesday October 29th, 2019
Bill Maher was at the top of his game the other night, delivering a trenchant riff premised on advice to candidates for the Democratic nomination. “This should be easy,” he said. “Just be less crazy than Donald Trump.”To waves of laughter, Maher mocked the prominence of marginal issues in candidate platforms, such as giving prisoners the right to vote (Bernie Sanders)...
How feminist Meghan Murphy fell victim to progressives’ double standardsThursday October 24th, 2019
If Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen were with us today, he might consider radical feminist Meghan Murphy, who holds dissident views on transgenderism, a fitting dramatic protagonist. For to any objective spectator of our call-out culture, Murphy carries the aura of a designated “enemy of the people.”A great hue and cry surrounds Murphy’s participation as a panel member dis...
The world now knows exactly who Jessica Yaniv isThursday October 24th, 2019
I can’t imagine there is a single person in Canada—apart from the complainant’s mother—who didn’t feel a great wash of relief when transwoman Jessica “Jonathan” Yaniv lost the case brought to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against the waxologists who refused to wax Yaniv’s balls. Even the most fervent trans activist knows in his or her heart that, given Yaniv’s public truculence, combined ...
As election approaches, don’t forget Trudeau’s neglect of the Yazidi peopleFriday October 18th, 2019
By now, most Canadians’ voting intentions are settled. It’s late in the day to be reminding people of why they should—or shouldn’t—consider a party or its leader worthy of their vote. Nevertheless, since no other commentator has brought the issue up, I want to remind readers of the Trudeau government’s shameful neglect of the Yazidi people in their hour of gr...
Secularism Versus Religion: Is Humankind at a Crossroads?Thursday October 17th, 2019
In a September column for the National Post, I discussed the recent revival of controversy about Charles Darwin’s “beautiful theory” of evolution, following the 2013 publication of “Darwin’s Doubt” by Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
In his book, Meyer rebuts Darwin’s reigning principle: that all life forms, including humans, have ev...
Kay: The population bomb’s biggest bombThursday October 17th, 2019
The international buzz surrounding teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s sojourn in North America offers a troubling glimpse into the West’s escalating love affair with climate alarmism.
Last December, a Swedish church anointed Thunberg a “successor” to Jesus Christ. And on a recent climate march in Montreal, one supporter carried a sign likening Thunberg to Joan of Arc (perhaps he ...
Stop the conspiracy theories about Canadian Catholics in governmentTuesday October 15th, 2019
Pundits Michael Coren of Ontario and Richard Martineau of Quebec don’t normally coincide polemically. But they have lately converged on one issue.Both have elected to gin up fears that Andrew Scheer’s campaign promise not to introduce an abortion law might, in the (unlikely) event of a CPC majority, yield to his fervent pro-life convictions. And both have justified their scaremon...
City of Edmonton shuts down pro-life group’s plans for the second timeFriday October 11th, 2019
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), on whose board I sit, offers pro bono legal services to individuals or groups whose Charter rights the JCCF agrees have been breached. They have announced that they are filing a court application on behalf of the Alberta March for Life (AMLA) and its vice-chair, Jerry Pasternak, “against the City of Edmonton for its decision to ...
If you can only love a pit bull, you’re not a dog loverThursday October 10th, 2019
The Toronto Star reports that the Ford government is “considering all options,” including repeal, regarding Ontario’s 2005 Dog Owners’ Liability Act and breed specific legislation, commonly understood as the pit bull ban. This dismays, but does not surprise me. Dangerous-dog legislation comes hard, and repeal often comes easy.Repeal comes easy, paradoxically, because breed specif...
The deification of Greta Thunberg shows our culture at peak panicFriday October 4th, 2019
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has been likened to Joan of Arc, and a Church in Sweden calls her a “successor” to Jesus Christ. In September she was named as one of four winners of the 2019 Right Livelihood Award, known as Sweden’s “alternative Nobel Prize” for “inspiring and amplifying political demands for urgent climate action reflecting scientific facts.” Multitude...
Prince Harry needs to keep calm and carry onTuesday October 1st, 2019
In conversation with a student at a multi-faith reception during the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 10-day South Africa tour, Prince Harry reportedly confessed to being so “overwhelmed” by the world’s problems that he sometimes struggles to get out of bed in the morning. He is particularly afflicted by eco-anxiety.Harry’s climate-change alarm is honestly come by f...
Concordia’s Liberal Arts College finds it’s not immune to cancel cultureWednesday September 25th, 2019
Liberal Arts College is a tiny college housed in an old greystone nestled within Montreal’s bustling downtown Concordia University campus. I’ve praised LAC in the past as an alternative for students seeking a traditional education in the humanities, featuring what used to be a standard core curriculum in the Western canon. The program offers a journey through the Great Books, beg...
Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to
Tuesday November 19th, 2019
Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools
Monday November 18th, 2019
Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head at McGill University
Thursday November 14th, 2019
Kay: Anti-Semitism is back in Berlin
Thursday November 14th, 2019
