Barbara Kay

Barbara Kay (born 1943) is a Canadian columnist for the conservative newspaper The National Post. She also writes a weekly column for The Post Millennial and a monthly column for the Epoch Times, both far-right publications.

Early life and education Kay was born in 1943 to an "intensely patriotic" American mother from Detroit, Michigan, Although only one of Kay's father's siblings went to university, all of them "ended up solidly in the middle class. Barbara Kay's cousins, including the girls, were "university educated" and had successful, prosperous careers. In 2004, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who co-authored None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948 wrote that the clubs—like the Rosedale Golf Club—were the "last bastions of restriction".

Kay is married to Ronny Kay. They have two children including journalist Jonathan Kay.

Career Kay began her journalism career as a book reviewer. During the 1990s, she joined the board and writing staff of the revived Cité libre. Afterward, Kay branched out into writing op/eds for the National Post before becoming a columnist in 2003.

Kay held a residency on CBC's Because News for nineteen months from 2016 to 2017 as a "token" and only conservative on a panel of liberals. She was removed from the panel allegedly because of "her views on the misappropriation of Indigenous cultures."

Affiliations Kay was on the Board of Governors of the conservative student newspaper The Prince Arthur Herald, which published from 2011 until 2019, and is on the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research's advisory board. In 2007, faced with an increase in anti-Semitism,

Honour killings Writing for the National Post, Kay offered the opinion that honour killing is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon and that it is enabled by factors including sexism, dowries and a lack of a dependable legal system. Nevertheless, Kay says that the murders are a Muslim phenomenon in the West, where 95% of honour killings are perpetrated by "Muslim fathers and brothers or their proxies". Kay warns that females do not dissent as one might expect either: The women may describe victims of honour killing as having needed punishment.

Anti-communism Kay traces her anti-communism to the mid-1950s when her family, like many other Canadian families, considered building a "well-stocked bomb shelter" in preparation for a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Kay who was a young teenager at the time was "existentially" shaken by the possibility of that a "monstrous totalitarian" communist regime might attack the "freedom-loving West". Her hatred of totalitarianism and communism was fueled by a "positive exposure to capitalism" and by books that she read, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1946), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). In the 1960s Kay, who was by then a married graduate student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s, took no interest in campus politics or indeed any extra-curricular campus life.

Kay's husband Ronny was born in China in 1944. The most enduring memory from his childhood was the sight of liberating American soldiers in Jeeps rolling through the streets of Shanghai. While doing his MBA, her husband was co-editor of the McGill Daily along with Patrick MacFadden, who Kay described as a "militant Irish firebrand" and "more or less a card-carrying Communist". In contrast, her husband "whose Russian heritage had opened a privileged window on the realities of Soviet triumphalism, was a Reagan-style "evil-empirist" avant la lettre."

Identity politics In an article in which she compared contemporary identity politics with communism, Kay questioned the erection of an 18-foot bronze statue of Karl Marx, commemorating the 200th anniversary of his birth in Trier, Germany. Citing the 1949 publication The God That Failed by former communist writers who denounced communism, Kay wrote that the book has "much to say about their identity-politics cultural cousins of today, and explained why we—classic liberals and conservatives—don't have common ground for discussion or debate with them." Kay cites a former member of the Communist Party, Aileen S. Kraditor, whose 1988 publication described the inner workings of the mind of a rank-and-file communist. Communists [and those who promote identity politics], believe that "facts [are] contingent on dogma". They are so strongly possessed by an ideology, that the ideology "determines what they accept as evidence. Facts and logic can never make them change their fundamental worldview as long as the need for it remains as the organizing principle of their personalities."

In her article about Sarina Singh, published just before Kay participated in a July 2018 panel discussion on free speech organized by Singh, Kay described how Singh had left her job as social worker, where she had worked for twenty-two years in a shelter, and broke with feminism. Singh who had been a "social-justice warrior", an "ardent feminist" who worked in social work, a "field dominated by feminist premises", became a "free speech champion". Singh refused to "see the world through the lens of ideology, identity politics or political correctness".

Free speech In her May 2017 article, Kay defended Frances Widdowson, as the "lone academic" challenging Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)'s conclusions and methodologies, such as oral histories. Widdowson said "hile obviously there were serious problems with the schools that must be recognized and discussed, so as to avoid future educational deficiencies, labelling the schools as 'cultural genocide' prevents us from probing deeper into the structural reasons for the failings of these institutions".

Controversies In 2006 she was criticized for a series of articles accusing Quebec politicians of supporting Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. She coined the term Quebecistan. In 2007, the Quebec Press Council released a decision condemning Kay for "undue provocation" and "generalizations suitable to perpetuate prejudices".

In 2007, she wrote a column titled "Not in my backyard, either" in which she criticized Hasidic Jews for not integrating into the neighbourhoods in which they live and for being "self-segregating" and "cult-like". In 2008, Kay criticized the behaviour of the Hasidim towards the Deputy Mayor of Richmond Hill, Ontario, Brenda Hogg, who attended the Menorah-lighting Hanukkah. Kay wrote that if the rabbis, whom she called "black hats", cannot observe "small courtesies" then they should "stay in their self-wrought ghettoes and eschew public life altogether". In her July 28, 2010 National Post article, Kay wrote about Jewish messianism, the theme of a 2007 Michael Chabon novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, against the backdrop of the rise of the Haredi Judaism in 2010, an "extreme right wing ultra-Orthodox" that numbered approximately 1.3 million in 2010. Kay expressed concerns that could eventually dominate the Knesset—and "Jewish destiny".

In 2013, Kay published an article sympathising with Serena Williams's Rolling Stone statement regarding the Steubenville rape case. In a response to a comment, she said, "Ours is not a rape culture. If it were, our girls would be walking around in burqas". Further debate over what constitutes rape culture came in February 2014 when Kay criticized universities for exaggerating the prevalence of rape. Her claim that prudent women face a "statistically nugatory" chance of being assaulted was referred to as "irresponsible nonsense" by Toula Drimonis and Ethan Cox.

In 2018, Kay received criticism for comments she made in a National Post column about the perpetrator of the Toronto van attack, saying "I would have preferred it [sic] this had been an act of jihadism or something else linked to a clear ideology or cause" and that "Islamist terror is at least something we have come to understand".

Kay was criticized for citing a Kevin Alfred Strom quotation which is often misattributed to Voltaire—"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Kay said it was ironic that she used Strom's words, but felt they the words of the quotation made sense, even if they are those of a Holocaust denier.

Personal life Barbara and Ronny Kay have a son, Jonathan Kay, and a daughter.

Publications 2012: Unworthy Creature: A Punjabi Daughter's Memoir of Honour, Shame and Love, Freedom Press Canada. 2012: Acknowledgements: A Cultural Memoir and Other Essays, Freedom Press Canada.