Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the Quillett podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

Lucy Cross Wallace, who's now an undergraduate at Stanford University,

acknowledges that until very recently she was insufferable.

Wallace, who's on the autistic spectrum, doesn't apologize for her activism on behalf of issues

connected to autism, but she does regret that her activism

brought her into the orbit of a doctrinar social justice subculture that she now regards as

counterproductive. In a recently published article in Colette,

the author describes social justice cultism,

as she now describes it, as a sort of addictive drug

that made her feel righteous and morally superior.

Then she looked around and noticed that the activists in her community

seemed to talk a lot more about kindness than actually practicing it.

No one seemed happy and everyone seemed curiously brittle as if they knew deep down that their militant slogans were a cover for the same sort of personal doubts that we all have regardless of political ideology

Like many young people she learned that life is

complicated and comes in shades of gray even if we pretend that the solutions are

...