The Daily Signal - Long Arm of Cancel Culture Comes for Knitting

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

The word "knitting" normally evokes quaint images of grandma sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace, needles and yarn in hand, as she makes a pair of mittens for her grandchildren to wear while they play in the snow. Less likely are images of self-appointed social justice warriors demanding fealty to a cause as they systematically expunge conservatives from online forums. Even less likely are images of physical confrontations occurring at in-person knitting gatherings. In 2019, a blog post about a knitting enthusiast going to India exploded into a debate about "colonialism" and "white supremacy" in the pastime. A series of commentaries posted on the website Quillette detailed how the online social justice squabble bled out into the real world, resulting in real-life altercations between knitting enthusiasts in England. Jon Kay, a senior editor at Quillette and editor of the new book, "Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age,” has his own thoughts on this epic yarn. "It's tragi-comic," explains Kay, "It's hilarious because these are people who knit, but it's also tragic in the sense that a lot of these people, like, this is their life and their community. Their social community is other people who knit on these Instagram groups and other social media, and they're getting thrown out." Kay joins "The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about the absurdity of the knitting incident, as well as cancel culture more generally. We also cover these stories: During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether he was warned about the flood of Haitian migrants arriving at the southern border. After a phone call between President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron, France's ambassador to the United States, Philippe Etienne, who had been recalled, will be returning to Washington next week. Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against his niece and The New York Times over tax documents of his that she leaked. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, September 23rd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. On today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast, we speak with John Kay, a senior editor at Quillette, an editor of the new book, Panics and Persecutions, 20 Colette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age. He joins the show to talk about cancel culture and share some of the strangest stories of social justice run amok. And don't forget, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to today's top news.

Was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned about the coming flood of Haitian migrants to the southern border and yet do nothing? That is the question Texas Republican representative Michael McCall asked Mayorkas during a Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday. As early as June, McCall says there were reports of a coming influx of migrants to the southern border, per the hill. Did you have any warning, signs? When the sector chief is being warned about this, when the Panama foreign ministers warning on June the 3rd, and, you know, here we are in September, you know, months later. Did you see this coming?

Well, so we watched the flow of individuals. are seeking to migrate irregularly through Mexico from the Northern Triangle countries. And further south, we do indeed track it. And nevertheless, a congressman, as I previously articulated, the speed with which this materialized is unprecedented. More than 14,000 Haitian migrants arrived at the southern border last week, and thousands more are expected to be on their way. The Department of Homeland Security has increased the pace of deportation flights, taking migrants back to Haiti.

After a Wednesday phone call between French President Emmanuel Macron and American President Joe Biden, recalled French ambassador to the United States Philippe Aetienne will be returning to Washington next week. A White House statement regarding the call read, the two leaders agreed that the situation would have benefited from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners. President Biden conveyed his ongoing commitment in that regard. Aetian was recalled after Australia dropped out of a contract with France to purchase submarines for $66 billion last week.

Australia instead chose to work with the United States and the United Kingdom in response to growing Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region in a new trilateral security agreement called Ocus. Angry French officials responded to the news by criticizing President Biden, along with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and recalling their ambassadors to both countries. The French were informed about the new agreement between the August countries mere hours before it was announced. The submarines offered by America and the U.K. will be nuclear-powered, but not nuclear-armed. Former President Donald Trump has filed

a lawsuit against the New York Times and his niece over leaked tax documents. Trump is also suing three New York Times reporters. Trump claims the Times coerced his niece into illegally providing the paper with his tax documents. In a statement to the Daily Beast about the lawsuit, Trump said, more to come, including on other people and fake news media. The former president's niece, Mary Trump, called her uncle a loser in a statement and added, he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It's desperation. The walls are closed. in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. A spokesperson for the Times told The Daily Beast, this lawsuit is an attempt to silence

independent news organizations, and we plan to vigorously defend against it. Now stay tuned for my conversation with John Kaye as we talk about his new book and some of the craziest examples of cancel culture in the digital age. Conservative women. Conservative feminists. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are particular interests to conservative leaning or problematic women.

That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcast. Our guest today is John Kay, a senior editor at Quillette, as well as editor of the new book, Panics and Persecutions, 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age. John, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for your interest. Yeah. So first, I'd like to know a little bit more about you and the publication that you work for.

So for some of our listeners who maybe aren't aware of Quillette, what is it? How did you get involved with the publication? And then what's your journalistic background? My journalistic background is I worked at a conservative newspaper in Canada, which was a little bit too conservative for me. Then I went to a very progressive magazine here in Canada, and that was way too progressive for me. And so I was sort of journalistically homeless, and this is 2017, which was just two years after Quillette was created. And I think like a lot of people who write for Quillet, I was at a point that I didn't think my future was in journalism or in writing because I saw a lot of tribalization. I saw progressives becoming really cultish.

And on the conservative side, I wasn't, you know, I didn't consider myself a Trump fan. And I saw, even in Canada, you saw some conservative publications going in that direction. And Quillette was this thing that just, wow, that's something that hits me right where I'm. Matt politically. It's a classic liberalism and against what I would call political cultism on either side. And I got swept up in it. I submitted something. And then next thing you know, I was an editor. And now I'm doing their podcast. It's, uh, it's been great. That's awesome. So moving on from you a little bit more, let's talk about the book. So panics and persecutions, 20 quillette tales of excommunication in the digital age, quite an evocative title.

and from the back of the book we kind of get an impact of, or we get an idea of what we're talking about. So here's what's on the dust jacket. In an age when telling the wrong joke or using the wrong pronoun can cost you your career, Quillette magazine has provided a forum for thinkers of all political stripes to push back against the forces of intellectual conformity.

So my question for you is, where did this idea for the book come from and why write it now? So we published, I mean, we've published thousands of articles, but some of our most wide, Read articles were first-person accounts, people describing what had been like for them, say, in the world of theater or the world of literature, or they were at some NGO, and they witnessed, I mean, we now call it cancel culture. A lot of these stories were written before that term was popularized. And those often became some of our most viral articles because it showed people inside the sausage factory. It showed people exactly how tormenting this can be for people in these institutions or these subcultures if they don't tow the party line. And I got to say, things have changed radically just in the time that Quillette has been around.

I mean, it's now fairly common Newsweek. You know, you can't imagine a more mainstream publication. Newsweek just, I think it was yesterday, published a piece by a woman who was a municipal politician in the New York City area talking about how she had censored. herself about supporting J.K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling's views in regard to gender. That piece appearing in Newsweek, even like a year ago or certainly two years ago, would have been really controversial. And so now you have a fair number of outlets who are publishing these kind of creed-de-queur when it comes to people's experience with cancel culture. Quillette was, you know, we were a little earlier to that game, and we were doing it as early as, you know, the mid-2010s.

It's what we became known for. And a lot of those stories, we consider them fairly foundational for the Quillette identity and certainly for the people who wrote these things. It kind of defined who they were as writers. We collected them between two covers in this book. Excellent. So with that in mind, would you be able to maybe share one or two of the stories from your book that you find to be particularly indicative of this issue of cancel culture?

So one thing that really strikes you about what we call cancel culture is, just how obscure and often subcultural these, these milieus are where it happens. And one of the reasons I love being an editor for these stories is you don't just learn about the political and cultural war aspects. You learn about the social dynamics. And I'm going to pick something that's like when I describe this article to people who haven't read it, they think I'm joking. It's called knitting's knitting. That's what you do, you know, what your grandmother did. Knitting's Infinity War on Instagram, and it's a lengthy, actually, we published it originally

in three sections because it was so long, and it was about how the knitting community, in its online form, fell into this complete social panic over issues of anti-racism. It started with the most ludicrous. I mean, it started with someone talking about how they were excited about their trip to India, and they used the wrong word or something. And it became this crazy thing, which spilled over into real life. Like, people were confronting each other at knitting meetups in Britain. And it's, I mean, it's tragic comic.

Like, it's, it's hilarious because these are people who knit. But it's also tragic in the sense that a lot of these people, like, this is their life. And their community, their social community is other people who knit on these Instagram groups and other social media. And they're getting thrown out. Like their, you know, social media communities, their whole identity took them like years, sometimes decades to form these relationships. And because they used the wrong word, they were getting thrown out. That to me was fascinating because it shows there is no limit to how tiny and subcultural a world can be that it cannot be consumed with like completely irrelevant considerations of skin color and gender and stuff like that. It's, as I said, it's both funny.

Right. I think we've heard a lot of these different types of stories where some movement or another gets, you know, eaten up by a purity spiral where we start to, you know, well, you're not for the cause enough. And then all of a sudden it's like nobody can do anything anymore without giving the side eye to somebody else. So given that we kind of acknowledge that there are problems, I want to hear what your thoughts on like, what are the specific concerns about what cancel culture can bring? Why should we be concerned about cancel culture? Well, it's interesting you say that because on Quillette's on our own podcasts, we just published it today, actually, we spoke with Peter Bogosian, who just quit Portland State University. He was a philosophy professor there, and we talked about this very question. And he talked about how one of the reasons no one took cancel culture seriously is a lot of these stories.

Well, knitting is particularly obscure, but it was like gender studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies. this is the kind of stuff that even people in that field will recognize, like, it's, are somewhat disconnected from the everyday world of like building bridges and, you know, managing health care and stuff like that. But what, what he's noted, and I've noted it to certainly here in Canada, is that it's starting to get into engineering and physics and certainly the medical schools. Here in Canada, I just spoke to a radiologist who said that something like 30% of his course load consists of some kind of anti-racism training. I mean, these are, this guy is, you know, five years from now,

he's going to be reading x-rays and other images to see if, like, I have cancer. And his head is going to be full of all sorts of nonsense by, like, Ibrahim Kendi, instead of actual science that helps advance society. So now that this stuff is getting into the military, as I said, the hard sciences, health sciences, this is really important. I mean, you're starting to see the threat. we're going to roll back things like our commitment to empiricism and science and rationality. And in place of that, it's just, I mean, you see it already.

It's sort of a bunch of slogans and mantras dealing with matters of identity. So a lot of the stories here are sort of the canary in the gold mine because, you know, knitting, who cares, right? Literature, theater. Some of these are obscure. But several years after a lot of these essays were originally written, you see it going into fields that really, really matter in terms of the everyday functioning of our society. It sounds like there's a very distinct impact on the old sort of guard thinking, oh, it's just going to be on the college campuses, they'll grow out of it, and then, you know, in reality.

Well, this is why, you know, my boss, Claire Lehman, who founded Quillette, the reason she focuses a lot, and we focus our journalism on campus trends, what's happening in the academy, is because what's being taught today ends up being in boardrooms tomorrow and in politics. And so you see it here in Canada. I mean, we're in the middle of a federal election campaign and I'm getting campaign materials from people listing their pronouns

and I look at, you know, especially the left-leaning parties, like some of their campaign platforms, it's just a bunch of campus gibberish with very little that actually touches on stuff that influences regular Canadians and how they get services and stuff like that. and, you know, the United States maybe is a little bit further behind on that trend because there's, you know, more of an active, conservative presence there. But certainly when it comes to elite college-educated demographics, art, activism, journalism, sort of the commanding heights of intellectual culture, what happens on campuses, no matter how obscure and jargony it sounds, it's going to affect the lives of ordinary people. And that's why one of the reasons we keep a close eye on campus trends.

So moving on from that topic, I want to discuss sort of the aftermath of a cancellation. The question being, is there any way to recover once someone has been canceled? I feel like I'll see stories basically every day about this guy or that guy that got canceled for something, but I don't really ever see a follow-up about and now they're doing X or now they're completely unemployable. So can you ever get back to society once you've been canceled? So the answer is yes if you can make a ton of money for people. Like Louis C.K. is an example of a comedian who was, as people listening to this, no, was canceled. And by the way, like, he wasn't canceled for, you know, saying the wrong adjective.

I mean, he was canceled for some genuinely concerning sexual behavior. And, you know, if he were lesser-known figure, his career would have been over. but because he can command ticket prices of $100 or $200 at a comedy club, and I know this because he came to Toronto, I think it was last, no, two years ago, and much to the consternation of canceled culture officinados, it was, you know, did a bunch of sold-out shows. He's hard to cancel because he makes so much money for everybody.

J.K. Rowling, you know, one of perhaps the most successful living author in the world right now, some of her contemporaries in the UK at Public. They tried to cancel. There were some young employees who said, well, we don't want to work at a publisher or, you know, a talent agency. That has anything to do with J.K. Rowling. And the people in charge said, well, that's too bad because, you know, she pays your salary and my salary. And there's absolutely no way we're going to fire her. And that was it.

So if you're famous, yes, you can survive cancellation. A lot of the stories we have in this book are of much more obscure figures. And often they are in government subsidized fields, like here in California. candidate, sort of literature and stuff. And they don't, even when they were successful, they never made a lot of money for anybody. I mean, what poet makes money for people, right? The reason they're successful is because they have the acclaim of their colleagues or, you know, they're an assistant professor at a good university, and maybe there's some grant-giving foundation that pays them a stipend or something like that. And as soon as those people get enmeshed

in this kind of controversy, that's it. They are not like JK Rowling and that they're making money for people, just the opposite. In many cases, they've been living off other people's generosity. And once they get canceled, that's it. Because these subcultures have a lot of gatekeepers. They're tiny, often, you know, to get a job in a field where you've been canceled, forget it. There's like 17 people who control the field and they all hate you. And those people have to reinvent themselves. And we have people in the book who basically what they've done is they've stayed in the field, but in a different faction of it. Maybe they haven't become conservative, but they have certainly picked, shall we say, like a different tribe, because the people who were on the other

tribe who canceled them will never, ever forgive them. That never really happens unless you really, really prostrate yourself. Once you've been canceled, and again, you're not a huge moneymaker. That's kind of it. People don't like to admit they were wrong about canceling you in the first place. Right. So one of the things that I found very interesting that happened recently up in Canada where you're based, there was a controversy surrounding book burning that recently came to light. Yeah. It was quite a story. I highly encourage our readers to look into this, but there was this story about some pretty radical leftists that took 4,700 individual books, burnt them in a quote, flame purification event, and then used the ashes to fertilize a tree.

in a symbolic act of reconciliation. And now these books were things like Tintin and Asterix and these very old comics that portrayed Native Americans maybe not in a 2021 acceptable light. So my question then would be, are book burnings and these sort of other authoritarian style removals of undesirable stuff, the inevitable endpoint of this censorious left

that we've kind of cultivated through cancel culture? So I think the book burning actually went too far even for leftists. I think they apologized for it, and I think even the progressive media had to admit this was a terrible idea. One thing that was amazing about this story was that this was done ostensibly on the initiative of indigenous activists working with school board officials. And shortly after the scandal of this book burning, because as I said, this was even for Progressive Canada, burning a bunch of books in this, I mean, just, they should have focus group, this term, like purification ceremonies. I mean, it was just like absolutely out of

a dystopian science fiction novel, this terminology they used. That after this was done, it then emerged that one of the women who presented herself as an indigenous leader, a leader of actually a indigenous commission for the ruling the real party of Canada, it turns out she's not actually indigenous. She's just, she sells indigenous earrings at $200 a paw at museums, and she's on this, heads up, this indigenous liberal commission, and she's gung-ho for book burnings to promote reconciliation for the historical crimes perpetrated against indigenous people, but she herself doesn't have a drop of indigenous blood going back to the 18th century, according to an investigation by Radio Canada, which is the French branch of our CBC.

And it couldn't have been a more symbolically fitting story because a lot of the people leading these, in most cases it's not actual book burnings. They're smart enough not to actually do that, but purging libraries and demanding that this or that book not be sold and stuff like that. A lot of them have extremely tenuous connections, and in this case a non-existent connection,

to the communities they purport to be advancing. And often it is people like this. It's privileged people who are either white or, if I can borrow the phrase from social justice enthusiasts, white adjacent, who are essentially indulging in upper middle class academic fixations in regard to identity in what they present as an effort to promote social justice. But it's not. It's just, I mean, it's their own sort of virtue signaling stunts, which doesn't really benefit any. I mean, just burning a bunch of books. If anything, it just puts social justice in a bad odor.

It doesn't help anybody. One would hope that, you know, somebody looking at an actual book burning in the year 2021 would probably have to question whether or not they were on the right side of history. It's a crazy story. I mean, the fact that they actually burned. And then you said for fertilizer, but it actually does speak to the climate here in Canada. So 2017 was Canada's 150th birthday. But rather than being a period of celebration, it set off a lot of hand-wringing a

the elites about what a racist place Canada was and the word genocide started being thrown around with people with a serious face calling Canada an ongoing, not just an ongoing genocide state, as if we were Rwanda in 1994 or the Nazis back in the 1940s. This is the kind of language that's been thrown around. And it's created a kind of social panic among a certain kind of policymaker to the extent that actually apparently you can now walk into a, you know, a room full of school board officials and say, hey, let's burn a bunch of books and then fertilized trees with the ashes. And there is no one in the room who says that's like the creepiest idea I've ever heard. Because probably people

in the room did object to that. But in the current environment, it's, you're not allowed to say that. And unfortunately, you know, we have to wait for episodes like this just to see how crazy things have gotten. But this, you know, this is an America's future. Where's Canada? We're a few years ahead of you in terms of this social pattern. And the fact that you're saying that it's in our future, that kind of begs the question then, how do we get rid of this kind of stuff from society? How do we rid society of cancel culture? Well, I mean, I think there's two things. One is every generation throws off the pieties of the one before it.

And you are, I mean, I already see this with, you know, my kids and kids who are like teenagers now. They are sort of starting to roll their eyes at a lot of the stuff that's being shoveled at them from their, like, like they're super woke, you know, 25 and 30-year-old teachers who's, you know, whose social media pages are just like a riot of rainbows and hashtags and black squares and green squares and purple squares and just every imaginable color of square. And teenagers are really good at sniffing out hypocrisy and cynical performance politics. It's like one of their great skills.

It's exasperating as a parent when you're trying to be earnest and teach them. things, but it comes in handy when stuff like this come around. So I think this is cyclical, and you're going to see teenagers pushing back in it. But it's also, like here in Canada, some of the biggest and most effective critics against progressive cultism are people of color, are, you know, lesbians, gay men, Jews like me, Muslims, who are basically saying not in my name. Like if you want to rend your garments because you're a wasp who came here, you know, your ancestors came here hundreds of years ago and you feel paralyzed by guilt and shame about the things they did, the historical crimes they committed,

which in some cases are very real and horrific things, that's fine. But please do not inflict that emotional dysfunction you are suffering on people whose relatives came here relatively recently. and who don't have your privilege. And they have different races and religions and sexual orientations. But a lot of us are just united by the fact that not only do we oppose a lot of this censorship and social panic, we doubly oppose the fact that it's being done in our name. Like it's being done to help people like me.

I happen to be Jewish. But you see gay men and women who resent the fact that the most absurd kind of gender, theory nonsense is being shoveled at the public in their name, you know. They said, this isn't how I live my life. These aren't things I believe in. This is stuff that a certain click of people made up and want to promote, but they shouldn't do it pretending that the rank and file of my community actually believe this stuff. And you're starting to see black people do this, and indigenous people do this. And they have a lot more moral authority to make, to say stuff like this than people like me certainly.

And so good on them. I'm glad they're doing it. Right. Now, I think it's, it is a very positive step when you see these sort of communities that are being told that, you know, this is what's good for you or this is, you know, to help you. And they're saying, well, I don't want it. Please stop. You know, that's a very positive. So, John, we are running a little bit low on time, but I wanted to give you the last word here. If our listeners want to learn more about the work you and Quillette are doing, where should they go? Well, just go to Quillette.com. I always tell people it's Gillette, but with a QU instead of a G.

That helps with spelling and pronunciation. Subscribe to our podcast, you know, Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts, and surf some of our content. You could also follow us at Quillette on Twitter and other social media. And my boss, Claire Lehman, is a great follow on Twitter. She's very funny and incisive. I'm the second banana, but I'm at John K, J-O-N-K-A-Y, and Jamie Palmer, is my colleague, and Colin Wright, who's also a great follow.

There's really four of us who kind of man the ship on a daily basis. So we're a small outfit, but I like to think we punch above our weight. So thanks for paying attention to our humble little book. Of course. Well, thank you for coming on to the show. So that was John Kay, a senior editor at Quillette, as well as editor of the new book, Panics and Persecutions, 20 Quillette tales of excommunications in the digital age. John, thank you so much for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast.

You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeart Radio. Please be sure to leave us a review and have five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks so much again for listening, and we'll see you. See you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.