The Great Canadian Unmarked-Graves Social Panic (2021-2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Quillette Podcast — The Great Canadian Unmarked-Graves Social Panic (2021-2026)

Host/Guest: Jonathan Kay
Interviewers: Mia Hughes (Beyond Gender, Ottawa/UK) and Stella O’Malley (Ireland)
Date: June 22, 2026
Theme:
An incisive and darkly comic retrospective on Canada’s five-year-long social panic over supposed "unmarked graves" of Indigenous children at residential schools, the failures of media and institutions during this moral crisis, and the broader collapse (and mutation) of social progressivism in Canada under and after Justin Trudeau.

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Overview of the Episode

Jonathan Kay shifts from his usual Quillette hosting duties to guest status, discussing with Mia Hughes and Stella O’Malley the genesis and fallout of Canada’s “Unmarked Graves” panic (2021–2026). The conversation examines the role of media, technology, and political opportunism in fueling and maintaining the crisis; the rapid secularization of Canadian and Irish societies; and the broader implications for progressive orthodoxy, national identity, and satire as an antidote to hysteria.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Unmarked Graves" Panic: What Happened?

[02:41–09:41]

• Trigger Event:
  May 27, 2021: Kamloops First Nation announced — incorrectly — that they had "confirmed" the remains of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school site, based on ground-penetrating radar (GPR).

• Why the Claim Spread:

  • Deep, real history of abuse in Canadian residential schools made the claim plausible.
  • Journalists, politicians, and many First Nations leaders misunderstood GPR technology, believing anomalies proved the existence of graves.
  • National mood shifted instantly to "horror movie narrative" — mass graves, genocide analogies, and flagellating national shame.

• Aftermath and Slow Correction:

  • No bodies were exhumed; “anomalies” became the official explanation after months.
  • Canadian media, politicians, even the Kamloops First Nation, sheepishly backed away — but not until vast social, cultural, and even violent acts had been set in motion, and few outlets corrected the record.
  • “You have these people, even to this day, kind of bizarrely and morbidly like rooting for the ghoulish...” (Jonathan Kay, 07:32)

2. The National and Media Meltdown

[07:30–19:36]

• Symbolic Acts:

  • Flags at half-mast for over five months.
  • Widespread burning of over 100 churches and destruction of monuments.
  • Politicians’ performative grief (Trudeau went on “morbid tour” of Indigenous reserves, exploited photo ops).

• Media Awards for False Reporting:

  • The “story of the year” per Canadian Press, long after it was debunked.
  • Reluctance of media to admit error or update archival pieces as the narrative crumbled.

• Quote:

  • “More than a hundred churches vandalized because of this fake news… The country lost its mind. It absolutely lost its mind.” (Jonathan Kay, 18:10)

3. Kay’s Role in Canadian Media and as Satirist

[09:41–15:07]

• Background as National Post and Walrus editor; ghostwriter of Justin Trudeau’s memoirs.

• Seen as a “conservative” only because of critical stance toward progressive dogma, though he identifies as a “boring Toronto lawn socialist progressive.”

• Role at Quillette:

  • “Explaining the inanities of Canadian media and activist culture to people like you, Stella… My job is to say, okay, what did we just see? And I explained to the class…” (13:45)

• Example:

  • Oakville teacher with giant prosthetic breasts, social experiment, and the international confusion over Canada's progressive antics.

4. Why Did Canada (and Ireland) Lose Their Minds?

[19:50–25:41]

• Theory:

  • Post-Christian societies rapidly secularize, leaving a “religion-shaped hole.”
  • Progressive activism, especially on racial, gender, and global issues, fills this void with “ersatz religion,” exhibiting the same surveillance and orthodoxy, just with hashtags instead of hems or candles.
  • “What happens in post-Christian societies… there's this casting about for some kind of organizing moral principle.” (Jonathan Kay, 20:06)

• Comparison to Ireland:

  • Both societies quickly went from traditional religion to new, progressive dogmas and performative activism, often out of proportion or context.
  • Social control mechanisms — gossip, surveillance — remain, but their targets and forms change.

5. The Role of Satire and Coping with the Culture War

[25:55–32:12]

• Satire as Psychological Survival:

  • Engaging in rage isn’t sustainable; satire turns mass delusion into material for self-awareness.
  • Example: WhatsApp “underground” in government Zoom calls, where everyone privately laughs at the public orthodoxy.
  • “You convince more people with satire than you do with rage. Because satire leads to self awareness.” (Jonathan Kay, 27:59)

• Anecdotes:

  • “Support group for people who are so woke that they just can't have any fun anymore” (Tracey Ullman Show parody, transformative moment for Mia Hughes, 28:29).
  • Parallel lives: one persona for public Zoom calls, another for irreverent WhatsApp chats — “like in Severance” (30:13).

6. The CBC’s Failed Prank and the Dynamics of Backlash

[34:32–40:34]

• CBC-funded, Borat-style “sting” show targeting not the powerful, but Canadian heretics and elderly hobbyists (including a canceled professor and a John A. Macdonald enthusiast), meant to humiliate critics of the unmarked graves narrative.
• “They flew a whole film crew across the country… brought with them some kind of lurid, amateurish John A. MacDonald impersonator… presumably in order to get these prank victims to say their own racist things.” (Jonathan Kay, 38:21)
• Media living “beyond shame”; lack of adult self-correction.

7. National Identity in Flux: From Self-Love to Self-Hate and Back

[42:18–49:15]

• Canada’s self-image veered wildly:

  • Early 2010s: “The world needs more Canada” idealism.
  • By mid-2010s: “We are a genocide state, more racist than America.”
  • External threats (Trump’s US) triggered “elbows up” nationalism and a new, opposite performance of pride.

• Quote:

  • “In the space of five minutes, we went from Canada as a genocide state… to Canada is the greatest country in the universe that we have to literally protect with our bodies in the space of five minutes.” (Jonathan Kay, 45:11)

• Political figures (Trudeau, Mark Carney), opportunistically capitalized on these swings.

8. The Timelessness of Social Panics

[49:36–52:21]

• Social control, orthodoxy, and tribal finger-wagging are ancient and recur throughout history — only the topics change ("Should there be altar rails or candlesticks in the church?" now replaced by hashtags and politics).
• Turning to history podcasts (like “Rest is History”) for solace and perspective.
• “It was ever thus.” (Jonathan Kay, 50:39)
• Advice: “If you don't like it, wait a day… Make a joke and wait a day… my ethos for social media.” (51:22)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It was our unmarked graveiversary… no pre-printed Hallmark cards for it, but maybe there should be.”
— Jonathan Kay, [02:41]

• “Flags at half mast for five and a half months — right, because they found a bunch of old irrigation ditches in British Columbia.”
— Jonathan Kay, [17:36]

• “The country lost its mind. It absolutely lost its mind.”
— Jonathan Kay, [18:16]

• “You convince more people with satire than you do with rage. Because satire leads to self awareness, right? … When you express rage, they just direct rage back at you, right?”
— Jonathan Kay, [27:59]

• “Social media is a wonderful tool for crowdsourcing totalitarian impulses.”
— Jonathan Kay, [24:23]

• “We went from Canada is this wonderful place, this beacon, a light unto nations… to: we’re a genocide state built on a mountain of Indigenous baby skulls.”
— Jonathan Kay, [42:18]

• “In the hair salon, you’re allowed to say things that you couldn’t say at your… I don’t know, in a non-hair-related context.”
— Jonathan Kay, [31:35]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–02:16 | Introduction, podcast context, setup for episode
• 02:16–09:41 | Kamloops “graves” story, residential schools history, media & social panic
• 09:41–15:07 | Jonathan Kay's background, media role, Canadian progressivism, satire
• 17:03–19:36 | Human cost: church arsons, statues, performative grief, media silence
• 19:50–25:41 | Deep dive into roots of Canadian (and Irish) social panics — secularization
• 25:55–32:12 | Satire as sanity, the WhatsApp underground, coping with culture war
• 34:32–40:34 | CBC prank show, targeting heretics, media beyond shame
• 42:18–49:15 | Canadian identity in flux, nationalism vs. self-hate, “elbows up” era
• 49:36–52:21 | Human tendency to moral panics, role of history, perspective
• 52:21–end | Closing, light anecdotes, advice: “wait a day; make a joke”

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Tone & Style

• Approachable, darkly humorous, and bitingly satirical even on grim topics.
• Tone oscillates between mournful about national failings and wry, stoic amusement.
• Open to jokes about social absurdity, but also layered with deep historical and philosophical analysis.

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Useful Takeaways (for Those Who Haven’t Listened)

• Canada’s “unmarked graves” panic was a mixture of real history, technological misreading, and self-flagellating media and politics — but it also became a textbook example of social mania in a post-religious, progressive nation.
• Rapid, almost hysterical swings in national narrative illustrate both media dysfunction and the psychological needs of post-Christian societies.
• Satire and historical perspective (and sometimes just going outside with one’s dog) can be powerful antidotes in times of mass delusion and culture war fatigue.

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Final Wisdom:

“Make a joke and wait a day. And that’s kind of my ethos for...well, for social media.”
— Jonathan Kay, [51:22]

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Transcript

[Jonathan Kay]

Welcome to the Quillette Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay.

If you like what you hear, please

Visit [e-mail] the site where Freethought lives. For essays, news and more podcasts. Sign up for our newsletter and become

a [e-mail] that's Q U I double L E double T E dot com

today is one of those days when I'm going to be turning the mic around and taking on the role of guest instead of hosting. The background here is that last month I was interviewed by Mia Hughes and Stella o' Malley of the Beyond Gender podcast, and with their permission, I've adapted some of the material from that lengthy episode for qualette listeners and YouTube viewers. As you'll hear, the interview took place on May 28, which is one day after the fifth anniversary of the start of Canada's infamous unmarked graves Social Panic as many of you will know, that was the lengthy hysteria that followed false reports that the bodies of 215 indigenous children had supposedly been found on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. It's taken years for Canadian media outlets such as the CBC and Globe and Mail to finally admit that many journalists got taken in by a fake story, and in the interim, much of the country more or less fell to pieces. As we'll discuss, this is just one of several ways in which Canada lapsed into a tragicomic form of radical social progressivism under the tenure of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who a year and a half ago was replaced by a more hard headed incumbent named Mark Carney. Under Carney, Canada now steers a more centrist course, but Trudeau's social justice spirit still lingers on in Canada through our activist and cultural institutions, which isn't great news for our international reputation, but as discussed, it's good news for someone like me who enjoys satirizing the inanities of Canadian public life for an international audience. Now, just to situate you so you can make sense of the accents, Mia is the Ottawa based half of Beyond Gender, but she's originally from the uk. Stella is based in Ireland and as usual, I'm speaking to you from Toronto. Please enjoy my appearance on the Beyond Gender podcast with Mia Hughes and Stella o'.

Malley.

[Mia Hughes]

Welcome John Kay, my favorite Canadian to Beyond Gender.

[Jonathan Kay]

Thanks for having me on the podcast today.

[Mia Hughes]

We're recording on May 28th, and this is one day after quite a significant anniversary in Canada that most people outside Canada probably don't even know happened. So let's start with what was the anniversary yesterday?

[Jonathan Kay]

It was our unmarked graveiversary. Yeah, there's no pre printed Hallmark cards for it, but maybe there should be. So May 27, 2021 was the day that there was this spectacular turned out false announcement from British Columbia, which is the westernmost province of Canada. It was claimed that in Kamloops, which is a city in, in the interior of B.C. b.C. Most people live on the coast, but there's an interior city called Kamloops. And the local First Nation, which is to say Indigenous group, claimed they had found using ground penetrating radar what they were certain the word they used was confirmed. They confirmed that 215 unmarked graves of indigenous children had been found. And this was on the grounds of a former residential school. Residential schools are schools that had been set up by the Canadian government to assimilate indigenous people into, into Canadian life in the 19th century and the, especially the early and middle parts of the 20th century. They're, they're considered quite infamous now. And there's a lot of legitimate terrible things that happened in residential schools. And because of that history, it was seen as credible that 215 children had been presumably murdered or ruthlessly done away with in some way. Maybe you know, they died in horrible circumstances and it was, everything was hushed up. They were thrown into shallow graves. And this was the kind of sort of horror movie galish narrative that was widely circulated in late May and then in spring and going on through the summer. It was a social panic through Canada. The idea that Canada was this genocide state, what have we done? We killed 215 indigenous children. And then all these other Indigenous first nations who also believed that this was true, started doing their own GPR searches, that's ground penetrating radar, and said oh, we found all these thousands of others unmarked graves. And the idea that there'd been like this huge holocaust and. And then belatedly people figured out that ground penetrating radar, it can be used to do a preliminary search for graves, but you then have to dig to confirm that it's actually graves as opposed to tree roots or old irrigation pipes or septic lines. Sometimes it finds artifacts from previous digs where people were looking for graves and they didn't find anything. But all GPR finds is soil dislocations and soil dislocations, which is to say discrepancies in soil density. I mean that can be caused by a hundred different things. But because journalists and politicians and first nations leaders at the time didn't understand that aspect of the technology, everyone thought they'd found hundreds and perhaps thousands of child murder victims, and the entire country went bananas. And then the months pass and people slowly realize that it wasn't true. But by this time, no one wanted to admit that because we had all these T shirts printed up. Even the First Nation. Kamloops, First Nation. They kind of even sheepishly admitted, well, we didn't really find bodies. We found these anomalies was the word they used. We're looking into it, and it's been five years and they've still been looking into it, and no bodies have surfaced. And yet, if you look on media archives in Canada, it's still. There's all these uncorrected articles that say human remains were found bodies. The New York Times, infamously, Ian Austin, who is an otherwise actually very good New York Times reporter, he got taken in hook, line, and sinker, and he became like a kind of activist champion on the pages of the New York Times for claims that even the First Nation didn't circulate. Like he. At one point, it was. New York Times said there was a mass grave, like in Siberinica or something like that, which even at the time, the. The first nation in question hadn't said, because a mass grave is like when you dump bodies, like firewood, like a concentration camp or something. So it's summoned to mind sort of like Dachau or as I said, Sabrina, just complete nonsense. Horror movie fantasies credulously circulated all across Canada. Justin Trudeau, who was then our prime minister, did this morbid tour of indigenous reserves and took a knee because this was this. This was a year after blm. So he was looking for his. Yeah, yeah, he was looking for his BLM George Floyd photo op. And. And he's like. He never needs much. Needed much encouragement to do these, like, mockish high school drama things. And anyway, this went on for a long time, and only recently, like last year, the CBC was kind of a milestone. The CBC admitted, okay, well, they didn't find graves, but, you know, there's suspected graves, or they might find graves.

[Stella O'Malley]

Could be graves.

[Jonathan Kay]

Could be graves.

I mean.

Yeah, in the same sense that. I mean, there could be 215 graves in my backyard. No, I literally cannot tell you. There are not, like, I don't know for certain. There are not 200. I'm pretty sure when I bought the property, I think the real estate agent would have mentioned it, but it didn't. Anyway, so this consumed Canada for months and months and then just lingered on as a kind of In a sort of limbo state. Where you had all these journalists who had like, won awards and stuff for being very brave and courageous and talking about all the unmarked graves. And like no one wanted to be the first to say, okay, well, it turns out it's all nonsense. Some people have started doing it. The New York Times ran an article saying, okay, they didn't find any graves, but, but at the same time attacking anybody who said so out loud as a, as a denialist, even though, like these articles themselves were technically denialist articles because they, they were admitting that they hadn't found any graves. But there was this really strange and very unsettling undertone which is, well, we, we really hope we find these dead kids because it would be terrible if it turned out these 215 kids whose names we don't even know weren't murdered. You have these people, even to this day, kind of bizarrely and morbidly like rooting for the ghoulish as we're recording this. This was Yesterday, this is May 27th. And it was just this incredibly awkward day because all of these newspapers and media outlets that made this huge. It was, it was literally the Canadian press, which is our like, you know, amateur hour version of the Associated Press or something like that, named this the story of the year for 2021. And they did this in late six months after the fact. By that time, everyone like kind of knew it was a fake story, but they sort of had to pretend that they still believed it. And so this was the story of the year for 2021. And this was the big fifth anniversary. And it was just so awkward because no media wanted to mention it, because if you mention it, you sort of had to admit that you screwed the whole story up. So the vast majority of Canadian media just studiously ignored it.

[Stella O'Malley]

Could I just ask you to tell people what you do?

[Jonathan Kay]

My position in Canadian media is actually very difficult to describe because I live in Canada and for 14 years I was a comment page as editor at the National Post, which is a popular broadsheet newspaper based in Toronto. Actually, to its credit, one of the few newspapers that very early on admitted and actually ran a big spread by a guy named Terry Glavin. Just admitting they say, okay, there's no graves. For many years I was a comment pages editor there. I was a columnist and then I went on to become editor in chief of a very high minded arts and activism magazine in Canada called the Walrus. It wasn't a good fit for a variety of reasons and I moved on. And Claire Lehman, who's the Founder of Quillette. She took me in like the lost puppy I was and led me to my true calling, which is to be a journalist who lives in Canada, but who is not of the Canadian media because Colette is Australian. And so for the last decade or so, I'm just kind of this guy who happens to live in Canada. And so the spectator on what is often like a fairly lunatic. Yeah, progressive.

[Stella O'Malley]

It's like you've got the front seat of the, of the asylum of the progressive world. It's. You're there.

[Mia Hughes]

I go, well, look what's happening.

[Jonathan Kay]

And the odd thing is in Canada, because I take the piss out of Canadian stuffed shirts when it comes to like all this unmarked rave stuff and the gender weighing stuff. They think of me as a conservative. I'm actually not even that conservative. This magazine that I edited briefly, I guess for two years, as I said, was called the Walrus. It's a very progressive place and my politics on most issues weren't that divergent from my colleagues. And in many ways I'm just a boring Toronto lawn song progressive. I voted for Justin Trudeau twice in Canada. I'm known mostly among some people for having ghostwritten Justin Trudeau's memoirs. And that's not a joke. I actually did that. I liked the guy. Yeah, yeah. And I was. Which by the way, those non disclosure causes. But he was the one who outed. He did an interview with the Toronto Star, this was in 2014, 2015, and outed me. And so conservatives hated me. They were like, oh my God, this guy is like such a hack. He's just takes stenography from Justin Trudeau. My former reputation in journalistic circles was somebody who was, who was way too close to progressives to be credible among conservatives. And then Canadian progressivism, even by the standards of the great awokening, sort of just went into this quantum shift on a whole bunch of issues. Not just the graves and gender, but like everything. And there were a lot of traditional classical liberals, which I guess is what I am, who are just left in the dust saying, like what? Like what happened? Like what, what, what happened to politics in this country? I just described a lot of people who write for Quillet. I just described a lot of people who work for Colette. This, this movement used to be called the intellectual dark web. And then everyone realized it's super creepy name and they stopped saying that. But whatever that movement is, I guess I'm still part of it and I happen to live in Canada. But my, my role in arts and letters, such as such as it is to a larger extent is like explaining the inanities of Canadian media and activist culture to people like, well, you, Stella, I mean me, actually lives in Canada, even though I don't consider her a real Canadian because of the accent. I'm the only person on this podcast that speaks proper English. And so I kind of, yeah, I went there, I went there. Dairy Girls, what do you think yourself? And I get email from people who are like, thank you for explaining why. For instance, you know, there's. I keep seeing this image of a teacher from Ontario wearing these giant prosthetic

[Stella O'Malley]

boobs that actually traumatized a lot of people. It was such a weird, strange, wacko story.

[Jonathan Kay]

So when you do the podcast, you have to do a still frame of this, please. Who apparently was like, who by the way, I'm not even sure was a trans person. I think it might have been a like some kind of conservative performance artist who was just like testing the limits of what the school board would allow.

[Stella O'Malley]

I remember I was given access to the parents, the in group of the parents of that school and they were all wringing their hands going, what would we do?

[Mia Hughes]

And everybody's a bigot and he's a bit mad.

[Jonathan Kay]

Oakville. I think it was like it was Oakville.

[Mia Hughes]

Can I just say though, because I got, I randomly, I get plunged into the world of being a journalist or a reporter. I just the post millennial one day show up in my DMs and offer me a full time job. I've never done this before and so I just took it. Why? Not for fun. And two days later that guy shows up and I'm reporting the very beginning of my time.

[Jonathan Kay]

A star is Warren.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, I just, I could not believe it. But I became, I was pretty much instantly convinced that this man is just seeing how far you can push it. I don't believe for a moment that he was expressing his paraphilia or whatever.

[Jonathan Kay]

I, I think as a social experiment it was completely successful because of course like instead of people saying, well this is grotesque and of course you can't be around children and whether you're mentally ill or this is a joke or you're a fetishist, like either way you have to find a new job and good luck with that. But no, it was like the school board met and they were wringing their hands. So that's the kind of story. I just introduced that as an example when I wrote about that. I get this emails from people all over the English speaking world saying thank you for explaining this because for the last day or two, all these memes from Canada involving it could have been that person. But there's any number of, like, there was the MMIWG2S LGBTQIA, like, impressed that I was able to rattle that. But, like, that became a thing. Just. This is more recently. This is just a couple weeks ago. And so my. One of my. I also do, like, a lot of serious professional journalism, et cetera, but one of my roles in media now, when someone in Canada does something that's so off the charts, indescribably woke, something from out of the late 2010s when the rest of the world was still into this stuff. When someone in Canada still goes in for this nonsense, my job is to say, okay, what did we just see? And I explained to the class, well, this person is like, in the. In the case of that MMIWG2SLGB, that was an actual politician, people thought that was some kind of just. I don't know what they thought that was, but I had to explain, this isn't a member of Parliament. Her name is Leia Gazan. She represents a now fringe party called the ndp. And what. What do we mean by mmiwg? Well, let's break that down. And I wrote this whole Twitter thread, and it wasn't even like a culture or Twitter thread. It was just explaining this to people. And I realized that this was extremely valuable emotional labor I was doing because

[Mia Hughes]

I just introduced you as my favorite Canadian. And that's basically the reason. Let's go. I want to go back to 2021, just for a moment and explain to the viewers just how dark that year was in Canada, just how absolutely horrendously grim and awful it was. Like, we had the flags at half mast. We had people screaming about genocide on the street. We had Trudeau and his photo ops, and you're going back to the graves.

[Jonathan Kay]

This wasn't because of the woman with the boobs. Just to be.

[Mia Hughes]

No, no. He came a year later.

[Jonathan Kay]

Just to be clear. That was also traumatic. But it didn't cause the flags to be at half mast for five months. Trudeau actually did put the Canadian flags on public buildings. Went down for five and a half months. Right, because they found a bunch of old irrigation ditches in British Columbia.

[Mia Hughes]

This is.

[Jonathan Kay]

This is what Canada became under Trudeau, who is now dating Katy Perry and is like some kind of C list reality show star.

[Mia Hughes]

And we've never. We've never recovered.

[Jonathan Kay]

And I wrote his book. I'm responsible for this monster. History is greatest Demon.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, right. But. But we had, like, the churches were being burnt down, statues pulled down, more

[Jonathan Kay]

than a hundred churches vandalized because of this fake news. This is real. Because more than 100 churches were either vandalized or burned. Burned out in retribution for this completely fake news that May 27, 2021. Again, this is our unmarked braversary. Plus one day, and at the time, infamously, Gerald Butts, who at the time, before he destroyed his political career, was best friend and aide to Justin Trudeau. He went on Twitter and he said that he found all this arson campaign against Christian churches to be an understandable response to the news that had been circulated. The country lost its mind. It absolutely lost its mind.

[Mia Hughes]

Right. And so this is why, just to explain why you're my favorite Canadian, is you were really the only person that I would log on to Twitter and there's complete insanity. The whole country's gone mad. And you were the only person who was.

[Jonathan Kay]

There are others.

[Mia Hughes]

I wasn't coming across them. It was just you. And you still managed to make me laugh. Very little made me laugh in 2021 in. It was grim in this nation, and you made me laugh and. And your takes on everything. It was. I was like, well, at least there's one sane, funny Canadian left.

[Stella O'Malley]

Can I ask you both, Is there a. Do. Do you each have a theory of why Canada lost its mind? Because it does seem to me that Canada has lost its mind. My own country has lost its mind. So I. You have my sympathies, but do you have a theory why?

[Jonathan Kay]

Yeah, I do. And it's. I mean, I'm not even gonna let Mia respond because she's like, she's been in Canada for five minutes.

[Mia Hughes]

I'd be delighted to hear what she doesn't even have.

[Jonathan Kay]

She doesn't even have her papers. She's like,

[Mia Hughes]

maybe she gave the bike.

[Jonathan Kay]

Actually, Stella, it's not dissimilar to the situation in Ireland. So what happens in post Christian societies? Chesterton, who was propagandist on behalf of Catholics, you know, he has that famous saying that when people stop believing in God, they'll believe in anything. Quebec society, French part of Canada, is more Catholic. They went through their quiet revolution, very Catholic society, and became a very secularized society in a very short period of time. And as a result, they became what we would now call one of the most progressive societies in Canada. Progressive as that term might have been used a generation ago because they kind of replaced religion in their. In their society with social progress and with what we would call leftism. And societies that become secularized very quickly often also go in for highly progressive political manias because there's sort of a religion shaped hole in these societies which is filled with, but in many cases is a very good thing. There's, there's all sorts of good things that come out of this movement and religion. You know, Ireland had all, all sorts of scandals and horrors associated with this Catholic background. One of the reasons Ireland, I think is, is so fervently anti Israel and pro Palestinian is if you look at the demonstrations on the streets, it's a sort of ersatz religion is. Which is not to say that there are no good reasons for supporting Palestinian rights except for, you know, you're trying to fill up a religious impulse that you have. But like a lot of the manias you see around gender and, and the, the watermelon emoji Palestinian stuff and some of the BLM stuff, it's most stridently expressed often in highly secularized progressive subcultures, often very wealthy. These are places where religion, real religion, has been utre for, for decades. And these are kind of religious style movements and they're embraced with the kind of fervor you, you know, we all have friends like, I don't know. Well, maybe you don't, but in university who like to suddenly become Scientologists or religious Christians or they start dating like somebody from another faith and like very quickly they become, within a matter of weeks they become like super into that faith or they, they pick up Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and they just won't shut up about libertarianism or whatnot. They think they have the answer. They're sort of, they have this born again fervor and, and often it's because in some cases, maybe they grew up religious or they grew up in a cult or they, they grew up with some kind of constrictive ideological casing around them. And then when they lose that casing, as you know, Canada is an extremely secular society. We lost our religious aspect very quickly in the mid to late 20th century. There's just this casting about for some kind of organizing moral principle.

[Stella O'Malley]

The weird, you know, anti Israel thing that has taken over Ireland, it's come from nowhere. It's come so fast in. It feels insane. It just feels like the country is just like you say, like with, with your mass graves in 2021. It's like you go into Dublin going, have you? What's going on here? It's extraordinary. It came from nowhere.

[Jonathan Kay]

What I liken it to is the social control. So in Canada, when everyone went to church on Sunday, that was when you monitored people. There was a woman, like the hem of her skirt was half an inch too short, looks like she's a married widow or something like that. And that's when everyone would gossip and exercise social control over the habits. Just an ingrained part of crowdsourced social surveillance. And a lot of these conservative societies, the habit of crowdsourced social surveillance, keeping your neighbor in check, making sure everyone believes the right thing, is deeply ingrained. And then when no one's going to church, people are using electronic means and monitoring each other's hashtags. Right. And so the Gaza thing was like, okay, well we've all decided that the correct hem length on your skirt, well, we'll now express that sentiment with hashtags and your views on the Middle East. But it's the same impulse to make sure everybody's on the same page. It's, it's a form of social control. It's a deeply embedded instinct in, in religious societies it's expressed through things like, you know, making women wear the kneecap. But in a post religious society you have to use secular means to do that. And, and social media is, is a wonderful tool for crowdsourcing totalitarian impulses. Sorry, that was a lot. Are we done? Is that the end of the podcast? Do I go home now?

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah.

Where were, where were we?

[Stella O'Malley]

I tell you where you were. I asked you both, why did Canada go mad? And I think you gave a very good analysis of why Canada went.

[Jonathan Kay]

It's very similar in Ireland is the short.

[Stella O'Malley]

Yeah, it is very similar to Ireland. Yeah, I hadn't put that together, but it is. And there's also some sort of small country, kind of big country, kind of, we're busy beating the other country and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

[Jonathan Kay]

We never had an IRA though.

[Stella O'Malley]

Yeah.

[Mia Hughes]

Didn't Quebec have something like the ira?

[Jonathan Kay]

It was the flq.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Kay]

Kind of a quasi terrorist. Well, not more. I mean it was a terrorist movement. They, they, they did engage in murder at one point.

[Stella O'Malley]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Kay]

And, but they took direct inspiration from what they regarded as, as like minded groups around the world in Ireland and including at one point the Palestinians. That was short lived though. We had nothing like the IRA where, you know, the sort of ongoing arms struggle.

[Stella O'Malley]

In fairness, you weren't, you weren't occupied for 800 years. So there is a difference.

[Mia Hughes]

Oh no.

[Jonathan Kay]

Let's talk about crime oil for the

next hour and a half.

Let's, let's do that.

[Mia Hughes]

I'm in.

You should be a comedian. You need to jack in quillette. You got to get on stage.

[Jonathan Kay]

Well, Mia was kind enough to say that, you know, she was. She started reading my stuff just because I figured out early that if you're just enraged all the time, it's not good for your emotional health.

[Stella O'Malley]

Oh, you're so right. And there's so much to be enraged about.

[Jonathan Kay]

During COVID in particular, I spent a lot of time outside because I have a dog. I got into sport. Like, there were sports. I got into, like, disc golf and stuff. I was just outside all the time. And then I came back to my computer relaxed, and then I'd like, look at the latest Trudeauvian social justice nonsense. And I like. I make a quip about it. Well, yeah, hi. Yeah. After the spasm of guilt subsided, I'd make a funny comment about it. It was possible to make a funny comment about it in a way that would not have been possible if I'd been staring at my computer screen for six hours and was just in a state of rage. And I think that is. That is a good strategy for surviving the culture war, is if you're at your computer for an hour a day instead of 16 hours a day, you. You're going to have a funnier take on things because you're going to see this stuff as what it is for most of us, which is sideshow to real life. Now, tragically, there are people for. It's not a sideshow if your. Your children get wrapped up in the. Some of the gender stuff or, you know, there's all sorts of other examples, you know, not everyone. I have the privilege of regarding this stuff as a comic sideshow and as grist for jokes. But because I have that privilege, I'm going to run with it and I'm going to make jokes and hopefully, like, try and get other people to take a funny view toward it. You convince more people with satire than you do with rage. Because satire leads to self awareness, right? Because people see themselves as. Oh, is that how people see me, huh? Maybe I should stop talking like an idiot. And then you get results. But when people. You express rage, they just direct rage back at you, Right?

[Mia Hughes]

You've just reminded me. So it's embarrassing for me to admit that I do. I was a little bit woke at one point.

[Jonathan Kay]

We all were. I was.

[Mia Hughes]

Okay, well, do you remember? I don't remember what year this was. I was still woke, but I kind of knew that I wasn't like all of my woke friends, but I was definitely going along with all this silliness. And then there was the Tracey Ullman Show. I think it's a BBC comedy. I'm not sure where she did a support group for people who are so woke that they just can't have any fun anymore.

Oh, yeah, that was very fun.

It was so funny. And I saw myself in it, and that was one of the biggest cracks. I was like, that I cannot be. I think it was BBC.

[Jonathan Kay]

I remember even at the time, I was like, good on BBC for doing that.

[Oscar]

Hi, I'm Oscar. I think, like a lot of you guys, for me, it started with the little things. Signing an online petition, going to a march. Well, I mean, before I knew, I was writing to the Guardian about LGBT representation in the Harry Potter book, which is shocking, by the way.

[Jonathan Kay]

All right, Lily, we've all read your blog, by the way. It's interesting when you say, you know, oh, I was, I was in this woke group, but like, unlike the others, I was self aware. You don't. Maybe everyone felt that way.

[Mia Hughes]

Yes, yes, yes, that's true.

[Jonathan Kay]

I was talking to somebody in the Canadian government and there were like 20 people on the call, and it was a zoom call. And everything was conducted in the idiom of hyper wokeness, stultifying, hyper progressive jargon. And then this sort of WhatsApp group formed in parallel so that as people were having the zoom call, they were texting each other, you know, two or three of them. The Mia Hughes types, right? The bad girls who are like, oh, can you believe? Can you believe what we're talking about? Can you believe we're using this word? And then after a while, there was like four or five people in the WhatsApp group. By the end of it, all of them were in the WhatsApp group. So they were having two conversations. Like, there was like 20 people on a zoom call. And it's like start off with some five minute land acknowledgement. And then, you know, they do pronounce landscape acknowledgement. But they were having this completely parallel conversation on WhatsApp. Just making fun. It was like, have you seen Severance?

[Mia Hughes]

Yes, like Severance.

[Jonathan Kay]

Okay, so you know, in Severance where there's, you know, there's a work version of you and Stella, you look blank. Don't worry, the show will come to early sometimes.

[Mia Hughes]

So good. You have to watch it. It's so good.

[Jonathan Kay]

But the idea is that your brain is compartmentalized. You go to work and there's a version of you that doesn't has no knowledge of the audi version of you, the outside world version of you, and then the outside world version likewise has no knowledge of the work version of you. That is kind of what these people were experiencing. There was like a self aware, funny, interesting WhatsApp version of them and a Zoom government approved because they all knew the Zoom call was being recorded, so they couldn't actually say anything that was true or interesting.

[Mia Hughes]

Wow.

[Jonathan Kay]

Whereas the WhatsApp group, they could actually say things that were true and interesting because it wasn't reported.

[Mia Hughes]

That fills me with so much hope, though, that, that, that WhatsApp group existed. That's, that's a perfect analogy, though. With severance, I. I will say, when I go and get my hair done, my hairstylist knows what I do for a living. So when I go and get my hair done, we start turfing it up the moment I sit down and we turf it up the whole time. But I have noticed over the years that as soon as we start turfing it up, the person next to me starts listening in and then she's got something to say and then somebody else starts contributing to the conversation. And every single time now the entire salon ends up turfing it up.

[Jonathan Kay]

There is, as I understand it, like a social contract that says, like, in the hair salon, you're allowed to say things that you couldn't say at your. I don't know, in a non hair related context. Right? I mean, I don't know. I don't go to a lot of hair salons, but actually I get my haircut in a Chinatown place where as the guy's cutting my hair, he's actually watching Chinese soap operas on his phone and he'll start screaming and it's like, what happened? Did you cut me? And he's like, it's because some of the action on his phone. But I only pay $14 for the haircut. And we don't turf it up because he doesn't speak English.

[Stella O'Malley]

You know, I don't often hear people say that about Canada. I know that about Ireland, like, Christ, you know, people stop me in the street regularly and say, thanks very much for your work.

[Jonathan Kay]

By the way, did you, Did I ever show you that column I wrote from last year about how I was in Dublin and I accidentally invited a prostitute to my hotel room?

[Mia Hughes]

No, but we better include that in the note. How'd you do that?

[Jonathan Kay]

But anyways, the column is about how, like, as I was checking out of the hotel, there's this woman who said she was pregnant and I let her into the hotel, which had a Key lock system. I can let people read the column. And she said, oh, I'm pregnant. And like, is there a bathroom here? But the management didn't want to let her use the bathroom. I was like, oh, my God, this woman's pregnant, like. And I handed her the key to my hotel room. I was actually about to get on a bus to the airport. I say, oh, my God. If you're like. If a woman says she's pregnant, like, I'll do anything ever. Give her my plane. Like. But any man will. Like, this is just. This is just a kind of life hack for women. Like, if you say to a man, I'm pregnant, he'll carry your. Your bags, he'll drive you across town. Like, it's just kind of this encoded thing in the male brain that you help women who are pregnant. And I assume women help each other if they're pregnant. It was like it was five in the morning. Dublin, unlike other modern cities, does not have a train to the airport. You have to take a bus to the airport. I know, yeah, you'll get there. And I said it was like, literally like five in the morning. They were just starting up the espresso machine. I had my bags. I said, here, take my room key. You know, she looked all disheveled. And she said, oh, thanks. And then she let a guy. Immediately let a guy in. And they went up to the room together. And the hotel management was like, great, you just like, now you turned us into a brothel. And then they. She refused to get out of the hotel because the management went up and said, like, get out of the. You know, you could conned this idiotic Canadian. Give me the room key. Get the out of the room. And she said, no, that guy's my uncle. And I said, I'm absolutely not this person's uncle. And I'm like, not that much older than her that I could pass as an uncle. Anyway, I had to go up with the night manager, who is this wonderful Indian guy named Joash. We spent like five minutes trying to coax her out of the room, and then they came out. By the way, she stole the €30 I left for the chambermaid. So that's my memory of Dublin.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, let's just. Okay, let's go back. We have to talk about this CBC funded prank, supposedly, like Ali G. Borat style show targeting political heretics in Canada. Tell us about that.

[Jonathan Kay]

This was styled in the fashion of Ali G. And Borat. And the idea, or if you're a little older, Stella, you'll like Me, you'll remember Michael Moore, remember the filmmaker Roger and me. And it was an indigenous TV production company that hired two American performance artists to pretend that they were doing a conservative minded documentary aimed at performance rehabilitating Canadian history. So they sent out all these emails saying oh we'd like to get you on camera talking about how Canadian history has been like sullied by all these progressives who want to tear down statues and stuff. And to a certain kind of recipient the emails were, were very seductive because it was, it was channeling their complaints about progressive rewriting of history. And they targeted people who were critics of like cancel culture and who were defenders of traditional Canadian history. And they had lots of money. See that's another thing. Michael Moore for him was anti corporate. Like he'd go into corporate offices and. But he didn't offer these people money. He wasn't bribing them, they had tons of money. But these people, the CBC which is our state funded broadcast, well that's a redundant but our most state funded broadcaster and APTN which is an, an indigenous themed television channel, together they had all this cash and they gave it to these Americans and they said, well you know, go fool a bunch of conservative minded Canadians or at least anti woke Canadians into appearing in a film studio where we will then ambush them with in at least one case they took all these children's shoes which was, were meant to represent these 250 non existent kids who were not found in 250 non existent unmarked graves as part of that. And they, they literally dumped the shoes on a table. And this is one of the women they fooled, a woman named Frances Widdowson. She turned the, she started recording them and put it on Twitter a couple weeks ago. The idea was that she was suddenly going to be like, I don't know, outed as this hate monger. And the whole stunt would turn the tables on these so called denialists who didn't believe in the unmarked raves. The whole thing was kind of mortifying because the people who did it don't like, you know, as Ali G. It's funny. Like Sasha Baron Cohen is a funny comedian. He's skilled. Like he makes it look easy but it's actually very difficult. Remember when Ali G said, you know, I want to interview you about euthanasia. How come we don't talk about youth on other continents? Like, like that's, that's really funny. But it's hard to pull off.

[Mia Hughes]

But his, but Le G's targets were corporate figures as well. Or politicians or people, people in positions of power typically like the CBC flipped it. Well, I'm saying cbc, CBC funded it, but this, this indigenous group flipped it and instead of targeting those in the positions of power, they were targeting the dissenters, heretics. Francis Francis Widdowson has already lost her. She was a professor at a university. She was fully cancelled for her wrong thing. They targeted the 82 year old man who was just a John A. McDonald history buff. And they show up at his house and they spend hours in his house basically just to humiliate him, it seems.

[Jonathan Kay]

So that I, I broke that aspect of the story. His name is Brian Port Murder. He lives in Brockville, small to medium sized city, a couple hours from Toronto. It's sort of like flyover country between Toronto and Montreal. And yeah, he's a history enthusiast, as you said, 82 years old and occasionally he bears a striking resemblance to John A. Macdonald who's our first prime minister. And occasionally he's done historical reenactments, he's written historical essays, he's. He's kind of like, just like a local history buff. He's not especially political and they found out about him and so they flew a whole film crew across the country from Vancouver which is like 3,000 miles. It shows you how much money they have. And they brought with them some kind of like lurid amateurish John A. MacDonald impersonator himself who starts babbling like racist aphorisms, presumably in order to get these prank victims to say their own racist things. The whole thing was, was really strange and they pay people in cash. Jerry Armenick, who's wrote a column about it for the National Post, he got suckered in and he described how at the end of the interview the guy started counting out hundreds, like some kind of. First of all, I don't know anybody who uses cash anymore but presumably they did it in order to kind of disguise their identity because if they wrote a check, I don't know, somehow.

[Mia Hughes]

Wow.

[Stella O'Malley]

Where do you think we're going with all of this? Do you think it's going to get worse or will there be a backlash? I often think of 1970s Britain, Three Day Week and closed down and turn off the electricity and rubbish was on the street. And then what happened was Margaret Thatcher happened, you know what I mean? Like an extraordinary different political regime came in.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah. Can I just add to that? Do you think that? I just think some things are so terrible and so just completely beyond the pale that it jolts people like targeting a little 82 year old man, just because he loves Canada, Targeting people who love Canadian history, targeting political heretics. Is it likely that this was just too far?

[Jonathan Kay]

I don't know. I mean, the cbc, by this point, kind of lives in a land beyond shame. I think there's a lot of things the CBC has done that people are like, well, you know, no adult run, state funded media network could survive this. And then, yeah, you turn on TV the next day and there it is. It's. It just gets worse. The CBC actually gets, in some ways gets away with this because just no one watched. If it actually produced genuinely popular shows, I think people would care more because they say, well, they produced this great show. Why are they destroying their reputation with this nonsense? But the first part of that sentence isn't true. So people just kind of ignore it. And it's. They only get 1.6 billion from the government, which is actually like not a lot compared to all the other ways that Trudeau found to waste Canadian money. So they kind of, a little bit. I mean, I like it because it's a source of jokes, but I think the big answer to your question is that things already started changing, but in a very unpredictable way. Canada has an extremely thin and therefore unstable national self image. As a result of that, you can get these wild lurches. Until, I guess about 15 years ago, the national self image was Canada is this kind and gentle, pacifistic place. We are the social justice alternative to the United States. The world needs more Canada. And interestingly enough, when I started my brief two year tenure at this progressive magazine called the Walrus, that was still the dominant ethos. So like, we had these slogans like, the world needs more Canada. At Walrus events.

[Stella O'Malley]

What year was that?

[Jonathan Kay]

That was 2015. And at Walrus events, they'd actually sing the national anthem. They would ask soldiers in the crowd to rise. I mean, these are all hate crimes

[Stella O'Malley]

now, but it's like goose stepping now,

[Jonathan Kay]

like to sing the horrible. I mean, I'm sure they've destroyed all the footage, but. But to be fair, like, that was the dominant thing that, like. Well, of course we're celebrating Canada because Canada is this wonderful place, this beacon, a light onto nations.

And.

And then very quickly it became the opposite. It became, no, no, no, no, we're a genocide state built on a mountain of indigenous baby skulls and were even more racist than the United States. And by the way, and it became this urban legend that Canada was a slaving nation, even. Even though the British Empire actually outlawed slavery three and a half decades before. Canada came into existence. He woke up one morning and it's like, we're not a light unto nations. We're like Nazi Germany. And, and, and people started speaking of it like that. And that's kind of when I left this magazine because I said it wasn't just that I disagreed with it, it's just like it felt so performative and, and unstable that, well, if I stick around for this, like, I'll come back in a week and there'll be some other thing that we have to pretend to believe. But then what happened? This self hating ethos dominated the progressive class for about a decade. And the unmarked graves was part of that then. And this is, this is a very interesting development. The last federal election was conducted in the shadow of the Trump phenomenon and Trump's tariffs and his tariff threats. And he, remember Trump had all this like ridiculous thing, we're going to invade Canada.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Kay]

And so all of a sudden Canadians were like, oh my God. Like they rallied around the flag, literally. Like the same people who had said the Canadian flag is a hate symbol. And the same people who are referring to what they called so called Canada because we're just like this colonial fake country. They started to insist their neighbors put up little Canadian flags in their windows. And there was this. Mia knows this, this elbows up thing. This elbows up. It's kind of like this hockey thing. Like you go into the corner, elbows up and you're, it's kind of like, it was very cringey, but it's kind of a hockey reference where you're kind of like you're playing hockey. Aggressive. Sorry, I'm trying to explain hockey to someone from Ireland, but you're getting your elbows out. And the, and that became. And Mark Carney actually was a goalie. Was a goalie when he was in at London School of Economics and apparently was a good hockey player and actually is a legit hockey fan. Like, he doesn't fake it. And so he bought into this elbows up business. And remember me? I remember Mike Myers.

[Mia Hughes]

I do.

I'm dying here.

[Jonathan Kay]

Really cringy.

[Stella O'Malley]

But how'd you put your elbows up?

[Jonathan Kay]

The elbows. I was like, you go into the corner and like you're, you're protecting yourself and you don't, it's not, you're not like a chicken or something, but you. Anyway, the whole thing, in the space of five minutes, we went from Canada as a genocide state that we all had to renounce and we all had to hashtag land back everything to indigenous people. And you know, we were Gonna, like, return the land to the state of innocence that we found it when, you know, Samuel du champlain came here 400 years ago. And we went from that to. Canada is the greatest country in the universe that we have to literally protect with our bodies in the space of five minutes.

[Mia Hughes]

Right. He's not exaggerating, Stella. Let me just explain. I spent. Do you remember I spent eight days in Florida with Peter Boghossian last February? I got on the plane, and Canada was the hateful, genocidal nation. We need to be ashamed of it and everything. I spend eight days in Florida. I take a flight back with a. One of those snowbirds. We call them the Canadians, who winter in Florida, but they have to fly back to keep their health insurance valid

[Jonathan Kay]

and then go back down 182 days a year because 183rd day, you lose your health care.

[Mia Hughes]

Right? So he's flying back. He's a retired man flying back. I've sat next to these men on flights many times, and he's just ranting about Trump. So, like, it's too much for me. I open my laptop and I pretend that I need to work. And it was a strange, unsettling experience on the flight. And then I land in a nation draped in Canadian flags. Everyone's got Trump derangement syndrome. Everyone's got their elbows up, and suddenly we're fiercely proud of our nation. Again, it flipped in eight days. And that's the mainstream media.

[Jonathan Kay]

I don't use the term Trump derangement syndrome because I have Trump. I don't like Trump. I mean, these tariffs. He wanted to destroy the Canadian economy. People sometimes on Twitter, they. They assume, oh, you don't believe in unmarked graves? I guess you're a Trump fan. It's like, no, I can walk and chew gum. I can dislike Trump while also not thinking that I live in a genocide state.

[Mia Hughes]

Right? But. But I dislike Trump, too. But there's Trump Derangement syndrome is when you've lost touch with reality and you're swept up in a mass hysteria. And. And Trump is the. The source of all evil in the world is what I'm talking about. It was an irrational fear of Trump.

[Jonathan Kay]

You know what the weird thing was? Before Trump started talking about all the tariffs and. Which I recognize is, like, a long standing theme with him, but before he got elected the second time, Trump actually had a constituency in Canada. Like, there were a lot of conservatives who are warming up to Trump because, like, well, he gets the gender thing right? And. But then he just totally alienated the entire country, including 90% of its conservatives, when he said he was just going to gratuitously destroy our economy. My point is that Mark Carney, who's our current prime minister, and Justin Trudeau to some extent, although the timing wasn't right for him, they knew a good thing when they saw it. And they were going to be like, well, people seem to hate Trump even more than they hate Justin Trudeau, who by that time was getting pushed out by his own party. His own party was like, no one likes you. You have to go away. And he did. And Carney, who's no idiot, was like, all right, let's, let's want to put on the elbow pads. Let's put on the elbow pads. And like Mia said, it's like that joke, well, that half joke that George Orwell told about communists in the interwar period, the official Marxist Leninist line on something at, you know, Cafe Dumagueau was something. And you'd go to the bathroom and you'd find out you were a heretic when you got back from the bathroom. But, but strangely, this is the weird part, is that instead of hectoring our neighbors for flying a Canadian flag because it meant they were hate mongers, now we're hectoring them for not running a Canadian flag because it means you're not getting your elbows up high enough. And it's like, I'm like, how about we just don't hector our neighbors about anything?

[Mia Hughes]

It's all performative, it's all signaling and none of it. No, it's not. It's not. Come from a place of true reflection, that. Yeah, we got swept up.

[Jonathan Kay]

We come from a place of true, true reflections.

[Mia Hughes]

Yes.

[Jonathan Kay]

Just to make sure everyone. We're talking about other people. Yeah, right.

[Stella O'Malley]

In fairness.

[Mia Hughes]

I am talking about other people.

[Stella O'Malley]

In fairness. The finger wagging authoritarian wave that has, has taken over the Western world, you know, it, it really is very painful to live through.

[Jonathan Kay]

It really is the natural order of things. This is why I listen to ancient history podcasts, is like, you know, you know, Stella, you're from the British Isles, so you know this, that, you know, during, during the time of, of Henry VIII and that period, small towns went to war against each other over questions like, should there be altar rails in churches?

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Kay]

Should there be candlesticks in churches? The wording of certain prayers? And it was just taken for granted. People had different views. You know, Puritans had different views from people who were more Catholic minded, sort of Scottish Presbyterians. But they all, they all agreed on one Thing. Everyone has to worship the same thing. They were all unified in saying there's one true way to worship God, and if my neighbor doesn't do it, that's a problem. And that's a human impulse. Like, that's. Nothing has changed since then, in my opinion.

[Stella O'Malley]

It's so depressing. I listen to history podcasts, too, and I think I do it from the same impulse as yourself. It's trying to make sense of this time in history.

[Jonathan Kay]

It was ever thus. It was ever.

[Stella O'Malley]

Yeah. And one thing I. I felt real, kind of just like yourself around looking for heartwarming. I. I felt really. I went to the Rest Is History podcast in Dublin, and there was thousands of people there, and I kind of felt a renewed hope for the country. I was like, God, all these people spent all this money to come to this podcast. Actually, there's. There's more. There's more there. But that weird swing of Ireland just suddenly woke up and became, as they called them, Padinians. You know what I mean? They. They all just. It just. It sa. It felt like it was overnight. And I was like, what? It was so fast and so intense. It feels very insane and very.

[Jonathan Kay]

As I say, it's a religious. It's a religious style phenomenon. And I think that is one reason I love listening to history podcast. It actually makes me calmer because it's like, well, if, you know, if this country or this civilization was overcome by these, like, all these crazy events, and that's a city I might have personally visited a year later and seemed like a nice, calm place, maybe there's hope for us. You know, history moves in cycles. And, yeah, there's this old woman on the street who. I said something to her like, oh, nasty weather we're having. And she looked at me and said, well, if you don't like it, wait a day. And I was like, that's good advice. And it's good advice for history, too. Make a joke and wait a day. And that's kind of. It's kind of my ethos for. Well, for social media.

[Mia Hughes]

It's beautiful, actually.

We're coming to the end. Isn't that a lovely place to end? I don't know. I think. But isn't that a lovely place to end? What John just said.

[Jonathan Kay]

Yeah, old harridan telling me what an idiot I was. Yeah, let's end with that.

[Mia Hughes]

Yes.

[Jonathan Kay]

Yeah. Okay.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah. Okay. John, it's been a pleasure, an absolute pleasure. I didn't know this could be so funny. I thought this was going to be a deep Hand wringing analysis.

[Jonathan Kay]

Oh, you don't know me. You don't know me at all.

[Mia Hughes]

Then you don't know John at all.

[Jonathan Kay]

I have attention deficit disorder and it manifests itself in like 17 different conversational subjects every minute.

[Mia Hughes]

I want to go out for a few drinks with you, John. I think you'd be great fun.

[Jonathan Kay]

But Mia can attest, actually saw me in Toronto in person. I'm just like, like I'm a dead fish.

[Oscar]

I.

[Jonathan Kay]

Because I. First of all.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, yeah, no, that's not true at all.

Are you boring?

Not even for a moment.

[Jonathan Kay]

We go to a restaurant and I spend a lot of time talking about my allergies and. And I also don't drink. Unlike your Irish kinsman. One of the themes of this article I wrote, I was staying on o' Connell street. When the bars spill out at. Was it two in the morning or three in the morning? I mean, but it's like the worst stereotype of Irish punch ups.

[Mia Hughes]

Well, just to finish, I had. I had an Italian au pair, right? We live at the main street in Bur, which is a small little town, right? And I was driving her from the

[Stella O'Malley]

airport late at night and it was 2 o'.

[Mia Hughes]

Clock, it's 2 o' clock when the. Everything closes. And we drove into this and like

[Stella O'Malley]

the whole of like was just milling

[Mia Hughes]

with people and my little au pair, the little Italian woman, she kind of looks and she goes, what, what's this going on? And I said, oh, well, it was like a crazy place. And two men had their tops off. Are those two men fighting? And I. Oh, yeah, you drink taken.

[Jonathan Kay]

You know, you take your top off

[Mia Hughes]

and you start brawling like it's the

[Jonathan Kay]

19th century spirit of the Irish, you know,

[Mia Hughes]

Like the collective civilization.

That's what it was like.

[Jonathan Kay]

My reaction to this was very Canadian. Like I was like, do the police know about this? Like I. Anyway, so.

[Mia Hughes]

Yeah, okay, well, John, that was absolutely brilliant. Absolutely.

[Jonathan Kay]

Very fun.

[Mia Hughes]

Yes, thank you.

We'll catch you again. Hail Canada.

[Jonathan Kay]

Yeah, okay. Elbows up.

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