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 I should warn you that

this week's episode has a decidedly sober feel to it because the figure who looms over the events will be describing,

Richard Biltsdow, died by suicide last month at age 60.

Biltsdow was a veteran Toronto public school principal. He happened to be a gay man and a political

progressive. He also happened to be someone I'd spoken with many times during the COVID pandemic.

He even brought me in to speak by Zoom on one occasion

with some of his fellow liberal Canadian educators who, like him, were looking to

rescue Ontario's school system from policies that in recent years have become heavily

imbued with radicalized academic doctrines concerning race and gender. They say a conservative is a

liberal who gets mugged by reality. I don't know that that's true and I don't know that Richard ever became a true conservative.

But his own mugging took place in late April 2021 at a Diversity equity and inclusion workshop organized by his employer, the Toronto

District School Board or TDSB. At this meeting a DEI trainer named Kiki Ojo Thompson, she runs something called the

Kojo Institute, presented a lecture to Richard and about 200 other senior Toronto

public school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that Ojo

Thompson believes pervades Canadian society.

Canada, she said, is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism, in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and bigotry

regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.

It was a message that Richard found dubious. Of course racism and sexism exist in every society, including

...