Never Apologize - Katherine Brodsky On How To Survive Cancellation

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Kathrine Brodsky.

The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Cultural critic Katherine Brodsky is an example of what Meghan likes to call “Heterodoxy 2.0.” She’s committed to fighting censorship and groupthink but is also mindful of not becoming an ideologue herself. Born in the Soviet Union, she emigrated with her family to Israel and then Canada and is acutely sensitive to signs of creeping authoritarianism. She now lives in Vancouver and writes about a variety of topics, including the arts, technology, and the recently emerging debates about free speech and censorship.

In her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage—Lessons for the Silenced Majority, Katherine recounts her own cancelation event but, more importantly, interviews a range of people—including Katie Herzog, Winston Marshall, Stephen Elliot, and Peter Boghossian, to name a few—who have fallen prey to the online mob. In this conversation, we talk about what can be learned from a cancelation, what has become of the “IDW,” and how to move free speech discourse in a more positive direction, less grievance-driven direction. **

GUEST BIO

For over a decade, Katherine Brodsky has covered lifestyle and entertainment stories for works like Variety, WIRED, Newsweek, The Guardian, Esquire, The Independent, CNN Travel, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy Magazine, USA Today, Delta Sky, Mashable, and more.

She has interviewed many personalities, including winners and nominees of the Academy Awards, Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, Tonys, and even the Nobel Prize.

You can read her work at her Substack here.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

HOUSEKEEPING

📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Right now it's in the left is more sensorial, but that's because they are the group in power.
0:09.7	And in the past, they weren't the group in power.
0:12.2	And so the right censored more and the left saw this as the victims.
0:16.1	And now that they see themselves as victims who have power, they utilize it. And then what I am seeing
0:24.1	on the right spectrum, which I spend a lot of time with, is that they see themselves as victims.
0:31.4	And in some ways they are, it's legitimate, but they are developing that kind of mentality.
0:36.5	And they want to use the same
0:38.6	tools for their own means.
0:43.9	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. My guest is Katherine Brodsky.
0:50.5	She is a commentator and a writer and a podcaster, of course, who covers cultural issues, the arts, tech, and recently the emerging discussions around free speech and censorship and all of that.
1:03.5	I say emerging because even though that's been going on for a while, Catherine is an example of what I like to think of as heterodoxy 2.0.
1:14.7	She writes about cancel culture. She has a new book about it, but she's not an ideologue at all.
1:20.6	She was born in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. She later immigrated with her family to Israel and then to Canada. And because of that,
1:29.3	she is really sensitive to creeping authoritarianism from the left and the right and is committed
1:35.6	to calling it out and fighting it without descending into grievance politics. And even though she
1:41.7	has her own cancellation story, she is mostly interested in telling the
1:45.9	stories of others who fall and prey to the mob. And she does that in her new book, No Apologies.
1:52.2	This is a great conversation. We talk about many of the people she interviewed for the book,
1:56.6	and that includes Katie Herzog, Winston Marshall, Stephen Elliott, Peter Bogosian, and several others.
2:03.2	And we really try to get at how to move this anti-cancel conversation in a more positive direction.
2:11.2	Now, if you're hearing this right now, that means you are not yet a paying subscriber to the unspeakable.
2:16.8	So you're going to hear about the first 45 minutes of the conversation.
	...

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