I Used to Beat Up Sex Offenders. Now I Question the Mob.
An ex-prisoner reflects on Jeffrey Epstein, the Epstein files, Prince Andrew, and the rise of online conspiracy theories.
Ben Gunn
· 7 min read
Cancel Culture
A collection of 89 posts
Bertrand Russell’s Cancellation and the Ongoing Battle Over Campus Speech
How religious conservatives cancelled philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1940, sparking academic freedom debates that echo today.
James Huffman
· 7 min read
The Thornhill and Palmer Affair: When Evolutionary Biology Challenged Rape Orthodoxy
For their research showing that rape is generally motivated by sexual desire, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer were subjected to death threats and hounded in their personal and professional lives. And yet, they were right.
Zoe Booth, Peggy Sastre
· 8 min read
Epstein Mania on the Digital Borderlands
The longevity of the Epstein story owes less to new facts of criminal conduct than to its symbolic utility in alleging deviancy.
Claire Lehmann
· 6 min read
A History of Morality Clauses
The century-old moral panics and persecutions by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice are echoed today by cancellation campaigns from the moralistic Left and Right.
E. Lily Yu
· 14 min read
The New Speech Wars
At this year’s Global Free Speech Summit, there was a widespread sense that the US is at a perilous juncture.
Cathy Young
· 12 min read
“Nothing Is to Be Feared. Everything Is to Be Understood.”
An interview with Peggy Sastre.
Claire Lehmann
· 14 min read
The Unwelcome Truth about Rape
For their research showing that rape is generally motivated by sexual desire, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer were subjected to death threats and hounded in their personal and professional lives. And yet, they were right.
Peggy Sastre
· 14 min read
Requiem for a Zine
The zine community was a haven for all types of free-thinking artists, misfits, and heretics—until online mobs turned it into just another bastion of social-justice groupthink.
Hal Niedzviecki
· 21 min read
How Cancel Culture and Sensitivity Readers Are Shaping the Publishing Industry and Silencing Dissent | Quillette Cetera Ep. 51
As literary gatekeeping intensifies in the age of social media, author and Harvard fellow Adam Szetela joins Zoe to unpack how moral panics, elite ideology, and institutional cowardice are transforming publishing—and why the culture wars are being fought sentence by sentence.
Zoe Booth
· 27 min read
Another Tiresome Trans-Activist Power Play
The campaign to strip novelist John Boyne of his Polari Prize longlist honour shows that gender extremists still seek to control progressive arts subcultures—even as mainstream society rejects their illiberal movement.
Allan Stratton
· 9 min read
Trump and the Academic Cocoon
A New York Times op-ed by a Yale historian tries to see universities from the vantage point of an outsider. Instead, it unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.
Heather Mac Donald
· 12 min read
I Blew Up My Lucrative Public-Service Career (And So Can You)
A veteran of British Columbia’s public-sector workforce explains how DEI enforcers forced him to choose between keeping his job and honouring his values.
Nick Osmond-Jones
· 23 min read
Monstrous Things
Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess?
Allan Stratton
· 11 min read
The Return of Right-Wing Cancel Culture
It is dispiriting to watch some of the staunchest critics of woke politics engaging in their own brand of cancel culture.
Josh Allan
· 6 min read