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

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week in my first

podcast of 2024 I'll be talking to Atlantic magazine writer Michael Powell, whose name you might know from the years he spent writing about education and culture at the New York Times.

In early January, Michael wrote a real barn burner of an article for the Atlantic website called

The Curious Rise of Settler Colonialism and Turtle Island.

And I have to say, this article really got my attention.

Being a Canadian, I've become quite familiar with the odd spectacle of

progressives embracing indigenous creation myths, such as the idea that the world was created on the back of a giant turtle

or that indigenous people can exhibit a special ethnically specific kind of gender identity

known as two-spiritedness. But I didn't know that this kind of trend had spread to the United States.

Nor did I realize that the fashion for endlessly denouncing North American society as an evil manifestation of settler colonialism, which again has become quite fashionable in Justin Trudeau-era Canada, had also been picked up south of the border.

But Michael's article isn't just about trendy hashtags and slogans.

He focuses closely on the unsettling trend by which activists and academics

are weaponizing the idea of settler colonialism to delegitimize

the state of Israel within the context of the current war in Gaza.

A rhetorical process that can include the justification of Hamas terrorism

as a legitimate means of quote unquote indigenous resistance against the Jewish state. But before I roll tape from my interview with

Michael, two apologies. First, for my voice, which as you'll hear reflects the

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