Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week my guest is

Eric Kaufman, a fellow Canadian who for the last two decades has built an impressive academic career

in England, specifically at Birkbeck College University of London, where he's become a well-known

specialist on the subject of how societies respond to the

ethnic and religious diversity that result from high-volume immigration.

And Kaufman himself represents a sort of microcosm of the sweeping demographic changes that Western societies have undergone over the last century.

He was born in Hong Kong, but raised in Vancouver and Japan and counts his ancestry as half Jewish, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter Costa Rican.

In terms of his politics, Kaufman is one of those politically homeless, classically liberal figures that often appear on this podcast.

Like me, he's perfectly comfortable with the welfare state, the environmental movement, and most other traditional progressive policies.

But he's also spoken out against the illiberal tendencies of modern wokness,

if we're still allowed to use that term.

spoiler alert, that's something we discuss.

And because his research deals head on with some of the negative political effects that result from rapid

ethnical religious changes, he's come under fire from some academic colleagues who would prefer that this

kind of research be treated as a no-go zone on the grounds that it's, if not racist, then racist adjacent. Earlier this year

Kaufman decided that he'd had enough of navigating this kind of criticism and in

early October he announced that he'd be leaving University of London to start up a new research institute called

...