Xenophobia is reflexively condemned as a cultural sin amongst our intellectual bien-pensants. But what if another cultural group really is out to dominate your own group? In that case, benign xenophobia — the kind that aligned with feminism to produce Quebec’s Bill 94 — is what one might call an atout, a trump card in the grim cultural war games to which all democratic societies have been co-opted, where victories that do no harm to democracy, like the niqab ban, are few and should be regarded as precious.
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Although I’d quibble with the description of Quebec as generally “peaceful, democratic, and behaviorally tolerant“…
We recently enjoyed a talk by Barbara Kay about changes to the ideological atmosphere of the academy, from the 1950s through today. Here’s the video:
