Progressive Orthodoxy

A woman and two men on stage in front of a poster at the GRIT awards.

Tabletop Gaming’s Anti-Israel Meltdown: The Strange Tale of Waffles and Syrup

When the CEO of a boardgame awards show boasted publicly that she’d be disqualifying all nominees who ‘identify as Zionists,’ her event was quickly dropped from North America’s biggest game convention.

Jonathan Kay

2 Jul 2024 · 12 min read

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s New Enemy: Americans Who Accept Biology

A new SPLC propaganda document claims to ‘expose’ a vast ‘Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network’ that’s supposedly targeting trans people.

The Quillette Editorial Board

27 Dec 2023 · 12 min read

Hamas Terror Is Testing the Moral Credibility of Canadian Progressives

No movement that excuses the deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians—even under guise of anti-colonial ‘resistance’—can survive as a mainstream political creed.

Jonathan Kay

26 Oct 2023 · 10 min read

The Left’s Social Contract Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It

A relentless focus on dubious forms of ‘oppression’ is alienating traditional leftists. Saving the progressive movement means returning it to its liberal roots

Allan Stratton

20 Jul 2023 · 15 min read

A Public Servant Stood Up for Sex-Based Rights at a Gender Workshop—And Paid the Price

In a recorded DEI session on ‘Trans Inclusion,‘ activist Adrienne Smith told the dissenting staff member, ‘I’m past the point of seeking a respectful debate.’

Jonathan Kay

13 Apr 2023 · 13 min read

An Auckland Mob Shut Down a Women’s Rights Activist—And Proved Her Point

The violent treatment of Kellie-Jay Keen betrays the fanaticism and misogyny that has infected progressive gender politics.

The Quillette Editorial Board

28 Mar 2023 · 8 min read

Defining ‘Woke’ (a Word We Should Probably All Stop Using)

It’s fine to concede the (originally) progressive nature of wokeism, so long as we also call out the movement’s betrayal of core liberal values

Jonathan Kay

25 Mar 2023 · 7 min read

A Puritanical Assault on the English Language

Social justice zealots think they can save the world by inventing absurd new ways to describe it.

Andrew Doyle

6 Jan 2023 · 19 min read

Building a Progressive Tower of Babel

An American Jewish community leader describes how puritanical ideologues are co-opting charitable organizations and activist groups.

David Bernstein

13 Oct 2022 · 14 min read

When Disagreement Becomes Trauma

How does one deal with those who claim that debate itself represents an agony beyond human endurance?

Jonathan Kay

8 May 2022 · 8 min read

Watching My Beloved, Once-Eclectic Library Become Just Another Bastion of Orthodoxy

In 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed that illustrated the traditional conception of the public library. Under the headline, To Restore Civil Society, Start with the Library, sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote: For children and teenagers, libraries help instill an ethic of responsibility, to themselves and to their neighbors,

Greg Barkovich

6 Feb 2022 · 13 min read

Watching My Great Nation Lapse Into a Cult of Self-Abasement

I wasn’t a patriot until it had all gone; then I would have sold my soul to buy it back. ~Tanya, in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong For more than 20 years, from the mid-’70s to the late-’90s, Morningside, a three-hour daily broadcast that mixed

John E. MacKinnon

11 Nov 2021 · 14 min read

Anti-Racism as Office-Politics Power Play: a Canadian Academic Case Study

Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read. The

Jonathan Kay

7 Nov 2021 · 8 min read

The Vox Formula: Telling Privileged People What They Already Believe

The confusion of having an elite, educated status with having information, facts, and knowledge should by now be familiar—it is a move that journalists have made repeatedly to capture a high-end market and then clothe that market-driven decision as a journalistic value.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

28 Oct 2021 · 8 min read

Podcast #167: Vivek Ramaswamy on the 'Woke Smoke' Blown by Corporate America

Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with 36-year-old biotech entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy about how corporate elites burnish their progressive bona fides (and distract their critics) with anti-racism slogans and hashtags—instead of taking concrete steps to address real inequalities within their organizations.

Quillette / Vivek Ramaswamy

27 Sep 2021 · 1 min read