“Have you no sense of decency?”
The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence.
I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed.
The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.
The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots”) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators.
This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.
Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.
Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.
The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.
The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.
I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by [God of the Bible](http://1 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=syPELLKpABI 2 https://stefanik.house.gov/2024/4/icymi-stefanik-secures-columbia-university-president-s-commitment-to-remove-antisemitic-professor-from-leadership-role 3 Nicholas Fandos, Stephanie Saul and Sharon Otterman, “Columbia’s President Tells Congress That Action Is Needed Against Antisemitism,” The New York Times, April 17, 2024., and “Columbia President Grilled During Congressional Hearing on Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal, April 18, 2024. https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/370521/columbia-president-grilled-during-congressional-hearing-on-campus-antisemitism/#:~:text=Columbia%20President%20Grilled%20During%20Congressional%20Hearing%20on%20Campus%20Antisemitism 4 Miranda Nazzaro. “Netanyahu condemns ‘antisemitic mobs’ on US college campuses,” The Hill, April 24, 2024.)?”
Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.
President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.
What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?
Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.
Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welch replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.
The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”
That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.
During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”
Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.
The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.
After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle.
Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.
But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.
The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for
Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.
What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.
What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.
Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.
The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, where House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.
Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionist. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the students at Columbia ask for:
Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.
What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.
They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.
But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.
The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”
Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay
To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.
“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”
It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.
As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.
During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.
Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.
You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.
Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.
“My late friend Manoel Santos…took his own life just eight yards from my cell”
Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.
But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.
I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.
Your most devoted subject,
Julian Assange
When I originally made this Substack, I found myself in a very frustrating position—I had something I felt was essential for the world to know (that we were repeating the disastrous smallpox vaccination campaign, its cruel mandates, and the widespread counterprotests against them by the working class). Still, I had no way to get the message out. I tried to find a way to do so for a while, and eventually, Steve Kirsch generously gave me a platform to do so.
Because of this, I have a considerable degree of empathy with people who find themselves in a similar position to mine. Thus one of my goals in building the subscriber base here has been to make that platform available to those in a similar situation to me, and I periodically publish compelling things readers share with me I believe are accurate (e.g., this citizen’s survey of blood clots amongst the vaccinated).
Recently a longtime reader contacted me to share his story. Based on my previous correspondences with him over the last year, I believe he has accurately represented himself here. I also want to note that his story shares many parallels to the treatment of other doctors attempting to do the right thing throughout COVID-19 (e.g., Paul Marik’s experience).
One of the reasons we lack doctors everyone wants to see is because those who try to do the right thing get pushed out of the system. Because there is so much corporate control of medicine, even doctors who want to do the right thing know they have no recourse if the hospital turns against them. Those doctors thus have to choose between toeing the line and doing their best within those circumstances or leaving the system entirely.
Their leaving thus leaves even fewer physicians that patients would want to see available within the corporate medical system. For many things like emergent hospital care, the patients cannot address the issue by simply opting out of the system. These problems worsened during COVID-19, particularly in the blue states, which has created the unfortunate situation where patients often have to travel out of state for the care they need, which is immensely unfair, especially to those who aren’t somewhat wealthy.
Dr. Miller’s Story
My Covid 19 Cancellation Story April 9, 2023
I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around COVID and for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before COVID became a public reality, I was working as a successful Trauma Surgeon and Surgical ICU Physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed COVID case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to COVID with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy,’ but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
[Dr. Miller’s surgical specialty currently requires 6-7 years of grueling training after completing medical school and thus pays a high salary. Because of the investment required to obtain it, most doctors are reluctant to ever part with it].
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm, by various other providers, that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was “rewarded” with 12 complaints filed against me over a 2-week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. It followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to ‘get rid of Dr. Miller.’ None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of COVID patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple weeks later, it hit the news, but only AFTER the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and AFTER our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear- again, this was AFTER the real infectious surge was past.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, most all data was openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following: I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were “low censusing” any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular, and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, ‘Local ICU Overwhelmed.’ The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked, and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
[Mattias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis helps explains how people can delude themselves into a reality in stark contrast to the objective evidence in front of them].
Then, I watched as every policy, practice, and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical program have good patient outcomes be undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020-2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralizing to watch.
[This is an excellent example of a society in decline].
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, WA) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients, except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his COVID vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it! Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre and post COVID. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
[My observation throughout history has been that when a malignant collective ideology takes hold, only 5-10% will be willing to go against it].
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracized from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance, and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church - they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support, and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic, is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned/hardened subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked. When other doctors, health executives, nurses, and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
[Throughout my career, I have tried to volunteer in free clinics because I frequently find they are the only place you can focus on helping patients rather than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s the corporate medical system requires everyone to do].
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesized charges of ‘micro-aggression.’ There ended up being 2 separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages, emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labeled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavor. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behavior, and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension/termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable, and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
[One of the things that surprised me about working in hospitals was seeing things I’d previously associated with high school drama transpire inside the facility—something many of my colleagues have also observed].
Separately during this time, I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a 2-week course of Fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) prescription to help a patient recovering after COVID. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for COVID or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point but were apparently offended that I violated their protocol.
By March/April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practicing ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical license in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets, and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the establishment of medicine that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
[Dr. Miller made the correct decision. Had he not left, he likely would have been permanently barred from practicing medicine in the future. This illustrates a major issue with the current medical board system].
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realized there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practicing medicine and started working as a Primary Care Physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a Family Physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
Conclusion
I applaud Dr. Miller for being willing to share his story publicly. Many physicians over the years have told me that the medical profession's mistake was surrendering too much of each doctor's power to the corporate medical machine. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a direct consequence of this unchecked power grab.
In the future, I believe three concrete steps need to be taken to address this issue:
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The first is that patients living in blue states must create the political will to have their state governments stop pushing these ridiculous actions. Doing so will likely require directly informing the public that most of the laws and policies being enacted are being done to support corporate interests rather than patients—as directly attacking specific violations of medical freedom has been largely unsuccessful thus far due to it being blended into the red vs. blue partisan dichotomy (which is very difficult to shift in either direction) rather than being portrayed as corruption affecting the entire electorate.
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The second is that patients need to financially support services and physicians they believe in and, as much as possible, opt out of ones that don't. We are seeing a miniature version of that with Substack, as the legacy media is rapidly losing viewership (since most of what they publish is garbage). Simultaneously journalists are making more on Substack than they did at their old jobs—both of which are putting pressure on the legacy media to stop publishing garbage and making many journalists want to jump ship to Substack.
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The third is the doctors need to be much more aggressive in taking their power back (they need to band together—potentially with the correct type of union). The corporate medical system cannot function without them, and there is a constant shortage of physicians in the United States, so that position needs to be leveraged to force the corporate medical system to behave rather than perpetuate the current corporate status quo
Proceedings were paused at the public inquiry looking into the federal government's use of the Emergencies Act on Thursday afternoon after a medical incident.
A lawyer representing the Public Order Emergency Commission collapsed while he was questioning Ontario's deputy solicitor general, the second witness of the day.
I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.
In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, significant public housing.
We thought it would last forever.
In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto, because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.
I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.
Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!
Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:
That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neoliberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.
Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.
But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.
The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neoliberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.
The result of this neoliberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.
In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.
That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.
This obscenity cannot continue forever.
Wars are not incidental to neoliberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammelled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side-benefit for the global elite of enormous profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.
The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost of living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neoliberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.
There is going to be public anger, come spring, of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is only one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.
I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish parliament has recently taken powers to do the same. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neoliberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.
But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neoliberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.
The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.
A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).
Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.
The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.
It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.
Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.
How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.
The cynical weaponisation of the trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neoliberals and the more ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.
Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.
Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.
One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.
Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:
The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.
This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.
Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.
We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.
The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.
Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).
In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.
This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.
We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.
To sum up.
The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same.
In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.
The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.
The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.
There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.
Yet this will not hold. Discontent is now so strong, and public anger becoming so widespread, that change is coming. With no available democratic mechanism for change and a firm clampdown on the development of coherent radical programmes and on radical organisation, that change will initially manifest in chaos.
The Establishment response? They clutch at their pearls, twitch at their curtains and condemn the uncouth masses.
A comprehensive 17-part series covering the war in Ukraine from the start of the Euromaidan protests late 2013. Events are presented without commentary in chronological order, relying solely on raw footage, news reports, witness interviews and official statements.
No vulgar harassment of police — no “All cops are bastards” signs.
No rocks for every Starbucks window and those of small businesses. No blizzard of break-ins, no store owners standing guard on their shops. No arson or looting.
Jan. 6 insurrection Canadian edition? Ha! It is to laugh. I’ve seen more threatening picnics thrown by a few nuns.
Yet if you listened to much of the established press predictions, Ottawa over the weekend was supposed to be like Rome waiting for the Visigoths. Ooooh — the end of cottage government as we’ve come to know it. A full-scale assault on our Zoom Parliament.
Plain, straight reportage uninflected by the personal dispositions or ideological pre-sets of the reporters or the corporations they work for was hard to come by. Our stern reporters, always ready to squeak agreement to power, worked to set a context. I’ve seen more threatening picnics thrown by a few nuns
They perspired with eagerness that an almost completely incident-free protest might turn into a gathering of “yahoos.” That an angry diesel mob fired up by Boston creams and cold coffee would storm the House of Cottage and end democracy in Canada, such as we know it. They leaped at trivial individual mischiefs and tried to brand the entire protest as negative and even hateful.
The bottom line — they did not cover this protest in the gentle, generally approving manner they have covered so many others, from the Summit of the Americas demonstrations in Quebec City in 2001 to Black Lives Matter in 2020. I believe that Justin Trudeau joined that one.
The contributions over the course of this protest from the prime minister and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh were viciously demeaning.
Trudeau was extremely derogatory, to the point of calculated insult, concerning all who were not in line with his view of things. And he acted as a woke Pope in assuming the right to make the judgment on which views of Canadians were “unacceptable.” And to declare the protesters a band of racists and misogynists.
Does he not know the meaning of the words he recklessly threw out to brand Canadian citizens? “Racist” is the dynamite word of our time. Throwing the word “racists” at a collection of Canadians is mean, nasty, and false.
It must be remarked that a quadruple black-face prime minister is not the best centurion to stand guard against racism, or to accuse others, who incidentally are not so addicted to facial cosmetics as he plainly is.
You know what the saddest part in all of this is? A walk down to the protest, an easy talk with random truckers, with Trudeau saying his piece, and the drivers theirs — that would have been a Canadian moment. The civilized, respectful thing to do.
It was never to be however. Hard politics is better than harmony. Sunny Days has morphed into Mr. Thunder-cloud.
Then there was the other party leader, Jagmeet Singh, the scaffold and support of Trudeau’s stay as prime minister. Of Mr. Singh let us say it must be very hard to have the instincts of a demagogue without the talent to carry it off. But to give him credit, he does try.
First, just to set the stage, is it really that hard to believe that after two years of a pandemic regime some Canadians are not “on-board” with current policies? Hard to believe that people living and working (or trying these days to get work) far from Ottawa and power, feel left out and frustrated?
Sunny Days has morphed into Mr. Thunder-cloud
More to the point, is it also that hard for a Canadian political leader to believe that some Canadians act on principle, and out of concern for their personal autonomy?
Was not the NDP once, of all parties, populist in a positive sense, more tuned to the “working man and woman” than any other? Those days are obviously long gone and the dimmest memory. Instead what we got from the current and most-urban NDP leader was a smearing of the protest, citing a comment from one individual who claimed “the superiority of the white bloodline” as an index of the thinking of the other leaders, and by insinuation, the whole convoy. A crumb is not the whole cake. Let me put it to the reader: Is this tweet a fair description of the convoy:
Mr. Singh: “Conservative MPs have endorsed a convoy led by those that claim the superiority of the white bloodline and equate Islam to a disease .” (Italics mine.)
The convoy of Canadian truckers, of multiple ethnicities, may be many things. But it is not composed of men and women who subscribe to, use, or think in such crapulous terms. In my judgment Singh’s comments were the lowest of the whole weekend — and he had some stiff competition in that department.
Singh is either desperate to out-Trudeau Trudeau in demonizing the truckers, or there is a serious wobble in the runners on his cushioned rocking chair.
Singh's comments were the lowest of the whole weekend
Final point: Is it really that hard for Trudeau and Singh not to acknowledge that the full majority of people who went all the way to Ottawa are just decent people? Not racists. Not women haters? Not orcs. That these protesters may be as at least as fair-minded and decent as the politicians who govern them.
A talk with a dozen or more of these folk may not have changed minds, on either side, but would have had a touch of Canadian respect and politeness, and taken the charge of sheer politics out of this whole episode.
Far too much to ask I suppose when politics is a cynical game, the press are an essential part of the same game, and some guys in a truck, on the edge of making a living, travel across the country to say a few things to their government. After all … who are they?
PS. As I was writing this, the Conservatives, with their superb sense of political timing, were behind closed doors busily disembowelling themselves. More on that in the next column.
I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters. I have a perfect view down Kent Street – the absolute ground zero of the convoy. In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs, but mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns. At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their new found companionship. There is no honking at night. What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours.
The Convoy on Kent Street. February 2, 2022.
At 10pm I started my walk along – and in – Kent Street. I felt nervous. Would these people shout at me? My clothes, my demeanour, even the way I walk screamed that I’m an outsider. All the trucks were aglow in the late evening mist, idling to maintain warmth, but all with ominously dark interiors. Standing in the middle of the convoy, I felt completely alone as though these giant monsters weren’t piloted by people but were instead autonomous transformer robots from some science fiction universe that had gone into recharging mode for the night. As I moved along I started to notice smatterings of people grouped together between the cabs sharing cigarettes or enjoying light laughs. I kept quiet and moved on. Nearby, I spotted a heavy duty pickup truck, and seeing the silhouette of a person in the driver’s seat, I waved. A young man, probably in his mid 20s, rolled down the window, said hello and I introduced myself. His girlfriend was reclined against the passenger side door with a pillow to proper her up as she watched a movie on her phone. I could easily tell it’s been an uncomfortable few nights. I asked how they felt and I told them I lived across the street. Immediate surprise washed over the young man’s face. He said, “You must hate us. But no one honks past 6pm!” That’s true. As someone who lives right on top of the convoy, there is no noise at night. I said, “No, I don’t hate anyone, but I wanted to find out about you.” The two were from Sudbury Ontario, having arrived on Friday with the bulk of the truckers. I ask what they hoped to achieve, and what they wanted. The young woman in the passenger seat moved forward, excited to share. They said that they didn’t want a country that forced people to get medical treatments such as vaccines. There was no hint of conspiracy theories in their conversation with me, not a hint of racist overtones or hateful demagoguery. I didn’t ask them if they had taken the vaccine, but they were adamant that they were not anti-vaxers.
The next man I ran into was standing in front of the big trucks at the head of the intersection. Past middle age and slightly rotund, he had a face that suggests a lifetime of working outdoors. I introduced myself and he told me we was from Cochrane, Ontario. He also proudly pointed out that he was the block captain who helped maintain order. I thought, oh no, he might be the one person keeping a lid on things; is it all that precarious? I delicately asked how hard his job was to keep the peace but I quickly learned that’s not really what he did. He organized the garbage collection among the cabs, put together snow removal crews to shovel the sidewalks and clear the snow that accumulates on the road. He even has a salting crew for the sidewalks. He proudly bellowed in an irrepressible laugh “We’re taking care of the roads and sidewalks better than the city.” I waved goodbye and continued to the next block.
My next encounter was with a man dressed in dark blue shop-floor coveralls. A wiry man of upper middle age, he seemed taciturn and stood a bit separated from the small crowd that formed behind his cab for a late night smoke. He hailed from the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. He owned his own rig, but he only drove truck occasionally, his main job being a self-employed heavy duty mechanic. He closed his shop to drive to Ottawa, because he said, “I don’t want my new granddaughter to live in a country that would strip the livelihood from someone for not getting vaccinated.” He introduced me to the group beside us. A younger crowd, I can remember their bearded faces, from Athabasca, Alberta, and Swift Current Saskatchewan. The weather had warmed, and it began to rain slightly, but they too were excited to tell me why they came to Ottawa. They felt that they needed to stand up to a government that doesn’t understand what their lives are like. To be honest, I don’t know what their lives are like either – a group of young men who work outside all day with tools that they don’t even own. Vaccine mandates are a bridge too far for them. But again, not a hint of anti-vax conspiracy theories or deranged ideology.
I made my way back through the trucks, my next stop leading me to a man of East Indian descent in conversation with a young man from Sylvan Lake, Alberta. They told me how they were following the news of O’Toole’s departure from the Conservative leadership and that they didn’t like how in government so much power has pooled into so few hands.
The rain began to get harder; I moved quickly through the intersection to the next block. This time I waved at a driver in one of the big rigs. Through the rain it was hard to see him, but he introduced himself, an older man, he had driven up from New Brunswick to lend his support. Just behind him some young men from Gaspésie, Quebec introduced themselves to me in their best English. At that time people started to notice me – this man from Ottawa who lives across the street – just having honest conversations with the convoy. Many felt a deep sense of abuse by a powerful government and that no one thinks they matter.
Behind the crowd from Gaspésie sat a stretch van, the kind you often see associated with industrial cleaners. I could see the shadow of a man leaning out from the back as he placed a small charcoal BBQ on the sidewalk next to his vehicle. He introduced himself and told me he was from one of the reservations on Manitoulin Island. Here I was in conversation with an Indigenous man who was fiercely proud to be part of the convoy. He showed me his medicine wheel and he pointed to its colours, red, black, white, and yellow. He said there is a message of healing in there for all the human races, that we can come together because we are all human. He said, “If you ever find yourself on Manitoulin Island, come to my reserve, I would love to show you my community.” I realized that I was witnessing something profound; I don’t know how to fully express it.
As the night wore on and the rain turned to snow, those conversations repeated themselves. The man from Newfoundland with his bullmastiff, a young couple from British Columbia, the group from Winnipeg that together form what they call “Manitoba Corner ” all of them with similar stories. At Manitoba Corner a boisterous heavily tattooed man spoke to me from the cab of his dually pickup truck – a man who had a look that would have fit right in on the set of some motorcycle movie – pointed out that there are no symbols of hate in the convoy. He said, “Yes there was some clown with a Nazi flag on the weekend, and we don’t know where he’s from, but I’ll tell you what, if we see anyone with a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag, we’ll kick his fucking teeth in. No one’s a Nazi here.” Manitoba Corner all gave a shout out to that.
As I finally made my way back home, after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except PEI. They all have a deep love for this country. They believe in it. They believe in Canadians. These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war. The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians. They didn’t make high-falutin arguments from Plato’s Republic, Locke’s treatises, or Bagehot’s interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems. Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world; and they said enough. Last night I learned my new neighbours are not a monstrous faceless occupying mob. They are our moral conscience reminding us – with every blow of their horns – what we should have never forgotten: We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.
Friday September 17, 2021
University of Guelph
50 Stone Rd. E.
Guelph, ON, N1E 2G1
Dear Dr. Charlotte A.B. Yates, President and Vice-Chancellor,
I will forewarn you that this is a lengthy letter. However, it only represents a fraction of the information that I would like to be able to share with you. I have found it necessary to write this so you can fully understand my perspective. With my life and that of my family, many friends and treasured colleagues being destroyed under your watch, I figure the least you can do is read and consider this very carefully. It is incredible to note that many, if not most, of my on-campus detractors have judged me without reading any of my scientific arguments or talking to me about them.
The COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate at the University of Guelph
You issued a mandate that everyone within the University of Guelph community must receive a COVID-19 vaccine. I have spent most of my lifetime learning to be a very deep and critical thinker and to follow the weight of scientific evidence. I am a well-recognized expert in vaccinology. As per my extensive funding, research, publication, and teaching records, I am a vaccine lover and an innovator in this field. I promote highly effective vaccines that have undergone extensive, rigorous, and proper safety testing as the most efficient type of medicines that exist. Vaccines that meet these criteria have prevented a vast amount of mortality and morbidities around the world. However, I could not be in stronger disagreement with you forcing the current COVID-19 vaccines upon everyone who is part of our campus community. I respect the challenges that a university president faces when trying to manage a large and dynamic academic institution. However, your roots are as a scholar. As a publicly funded institution of advanced learning, it is incumbent on us to demonstrate an ability to view the world around us in a constructively critical fashion such that we can improve the lives of others. We should be able to do this free of political or financial pressures and without bias or prejudice or fear of censorship and harassment. As a viral immunologist that has been working on the front lines of the scientific and medical community throughout the duration of the declared COVID-19 pandemic, I feel compel ed to speak on behalf of the many who will not, due to extreme fear of retribution. We now live in a time when it is common practice for people to demand and expect to receive confidential medical information from others. I will not be coerced into disclosing my private medical information. However, for the sake of highlighting some of the absurdities of COVID-19 vaccine mandates I choose, of my own free will, to freely disclose some of my medical information here…
Those with Naturally Acquired Immunity Don’t Need to be Vaccinated and are at Greater Risk of Harm if Vaccinated
I participated in a clinical trial that has been running for approximately 1.5 years. The purpose is to develop a very sensitive and comprehensive test of immunity against SARS-CoV-2; in large part to inform the development of better COVID-19 vaccines (https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/146316 ). My personal results prove that I have naturally acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2. With this test, spots indicate a positive result for antibodies against a particular part of the virus. Darker spots correlate with more antibodies. Antibody responses correlate with the induction of memory B cells. Antibodies will wane over time, but B cells can survive for many years and rapidly produce massive quantities of antibodies upon re-exposure to a pathogen. On the following page are my results, along with a map of which part of the virus each spot represents…
The dark spot at position D26 is the positive control and indicates that the assay worked. My results demonstrate that I have broad immunity against multiple components of SARS-CoV-2, including the spike protein. Importantly, spot B26 shows that I have antibodies against the membrane protein. This protein is not highly conserved across coronaviruses. As such, it provides evidence that I was infected with SARS-CoV-2. Note that I was sick only once since the pandemic was declared. It was a moderately severe respiratory infection that took four weeks to recover from. The SARS-CoV-2 PCR test was negative, despite being run at an unreasonably high number of cycles. This suggests that I was one of the many for whom SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be of low pathogenicity or not even a pathogen (i.e. no associated disease).
There is a plethora of scientific literature demonstrating that naturally acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2 is likely superior to that conferred by vaccination only. Indeed, it is much broader, which means that emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 will have more difficulty evading it as compared to the very narrow immunity conferred by the vaccines. Importantly, the duration of immunity (i.e. how long a person is protected) has proven to be far longer than that generated by the current vaccines. The duration of immunity for the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines appears to be a horrifically short 4.5 months. I actually wrote a lay article back in February 2021 to explain why a vaccine of this nature would fail to be able to achieve global herd immunity on its own (https://theconversation.com/5-factors-that-could-dictate-the-success-or-failure-of-the-covid-19-vaccine-rollout- 152856). This is why places like Canada, the USA, and Israel have found it necessary to roll out third doses. And now there is talk (and a commitment in Israel) to roll out fourth doses (yes, that’s four doses within one year). The World Health Organization recognized the value of natural immunity quite some time ago. Unfortunately, in Canada and at the University of Guelph, we have failed to recognize that the immune system works as it was designed to. Its ability to respond is not limited solely to vaccines.
Here are some references to support this: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci_Brief-Natural_immunity-2021.1; https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiab295/6293992; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7803150/.
As someone who develops vaccines, I can tell you that it is difficult to make a vaccine that will perform as poorly as the current COVID-19 vaccines. Indeed, most vaccines given in childhood never require a booster shot later in life. The take-home message here is that people like me, who have naturally acquired immunity, do not need to be vaccinated. Nor is it needed to protect those around the person who already has immunity. Worse, research from three independent groups has now demonstrated that those with naturally acquired immunity experience more severe side-effects from COVID-19 vaccines than those who were immunologically naïve prior to vaccination (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PI S2589- 5370(21)00194-2/fulltext; https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.15.21252192v1; https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.26.21252096v1). In other words, for those with natural immunity, vaccination is not only unnecessary, but it would put them at enhanced risk of harm. Knowing this, nobody should ever mandate COVID-19 vaccination. Instead, it would be in the best interest of helping everyone make the most informed health decisions for themselves to make voluntary testing for immunity available.
Testing for Natural y Acquired Immunity was a Viable Option but was Ignored
You and the provost met with me and two other colleagues back in March 2021 and we presented the opportunity for the University of Guelph to show leadership and offer testing for immunity to our campus community in support of a safe return to in-person teaching and learning. You embraced this idea with enthusiasm and promised to move forward with it. This did not materialize so one of my colleagues contacted you. Once again, you agreed it was an excellent idea and that you would move forward with it. Nothing happened. So, my two colleagues and I met with one of our vice-presidents in May 2021. They also thought that making an antibody test available was an excellent idea and promised to work on getting it implemented on campus. Nothing materialized. They were contacted again by one of my colleagues. There was no response. There is no excuse for forcing vaccines on people, especially after having been given the opportunity to implement testing for immunity and refusing to do so.
The University of Guelph won’t pay for me to receive a booster vaccine against rabies unless I can demonstrate that my antibodies are below what has been deemed to be a protective titer. This is because it would not be appropriate to give me a vaccine that is not without risk if I don’t need it. Also, the university does not want to pay the $850 cost of the vaccination regimen unless I absolutely need it. In short, you will not allow me to receive that booster vaccine without first evaluating me on an annual basis for evidence of immunity (or lack thereof). So why was this principle rejected for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, for which there is vastly less reliable safety data available, and none for the long-term? Canada should have been acquiring data about immunity starting a long time ago. It is a particularly poor precedent for a university to reject the concept of acquiring data that could inform safer and more effective COVID-19 policies. Immunity testing would even benefit vaccinated individuals. It is well known that responses to vaccines in outbred populations follows a normal curve and includes individuals that are non-responders (i.e. they are left without immunity and are, therefore, unprotected following vaccination) and low-responders (insufficient protection). In fact, this concept has been the focus of an internationally recognized research program on our campus that has brought many accolades and awards to our institution.
You have banned me from campus for at least the next year. I can show proof of immunity against SARS-CoV-2 but you will not allow me to enter buildings. But someone else can show a receipt saying that someone saw two needles go into their arm and you will allow them to enter. You actually have no idea if that person has immunity. There have even been reported cases of people accidental y or even intentionally (e.g. a case in Germany) being administered saline instead of the vaccine. Does it make sense to ban someone who is immune from campus but al ow people who are presumed, but not confirmed, to be immune? This is a scenario that you have created. As a fellow academic, I am requesting that you provide me with a strong scientific rationale why you are al owing thousands with an unconfirmed immunity status onto our campus, but you are banning people like me who are known to have immunity. Further, please explain how you feel it is ethical to force COVID-19 vaccines on people who are uncomfortable with being coerced when you do not know their immunity status. Despite attempts to halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2 via masking and physical distancing, the reality is that the virus has not complied with these attempts to barricade it. Indeed, it has infected many people across Canada, many of whom may not have even realized it because it is not a dangerous pathogen for them. From the perspective of a medical risk-benefit analysis, this is a no-brainer. A medical procedure that adds no value but carries known and still-to-be-defined risks should never be mandated!
The University Back-Tracked on Advice from its Own Legal Counsel
I, along with two colleagues, attended a meeting with one of our vice-presidents in May 2021. In that meeting the legal advice that was provided to the University of Guelph was disclosed. We were told this included making COVID-19 vaccines voluntary, that nobody on campus should be made to feel coerced into being vaccinated, and that nobody should feel pressured to disclose their vaccination status. On this basis, I was to serve as one of the on- campus faculty contacts for anyone who experienced any of these issues. Did Canada’s laws change during the summer in a way that rendered this legal advice no longer valid? Now I am having to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to help the many people whose lives have imploded due to the university’s vaccine mandate.
I am a Scientist Who is Knowledgeable and Values Integrity Despite What So-Cal ed ‘Fact Checkers’ Have Claimed
There are many on our campus who repeatedly put my name out to the public with claims that I disseminate misinformation. Not one of these individuals has ever given me the courtesy of a conversation prior to publicly attacking me. None of them will engage me in public discussions of the science to allow people to judge the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of what I am saying. Censorship on our campus has become as prevalent as it is off- campus. My detractors, rather than showing a deep understanding of the science underlying COVID-19 vaccines, continually refer to the so-cal ed ‘fact checks’ that have been posted about me. Let me tell you some things about the so-called ‘fact checkers’. Firstly, they give scientists and physicians of integrity unreasonably short periods of time to respond to their requests for answers. For example, as I write this letter, I have 13,902 unread messages in my inbox and my voice mail is at maximum capacity. I have yet to see a ‘fact check’ request prior to its expiry, which remarkably, is often within mere hours of an e-mail being sent. This is an unreasonable expectation from a busy professional. Also, many ‘fact checkers’ lack sufficient expertise. In some cases, ‘fact checker’ sites have had to rely on postdoctoral trainees in other countries to write responses.
Most of the harassment against me began after ‘fact checkers’ cherry-picked one short radio interview that I gave to a lay audience. Some have accused me of only giving half the story in that interview. They were most kind; I was only able to reveal 0.5% of the story. It is unfair to critique a tiny portion of one’s arguments that were presented off-the-cuff to a lay audience with no opportunity for me to respond in real-time. For your information, I have rebutted every single one of the ‘fact checks’ that I am aware of in various public interviews. Let me give you one example that some of our colleagues on our campus have repeatedly misused while harassing me in social media…
One of the many issues that I have raised with the vaccines is that should a reasonable concentration of the free spike protein get into systemic circulation, it could potentially harm the endothelial cells lining our blood vessels. I cited this study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.121.318902. The authors were contacted, and they claimed I had misinterpreted the study. They said that spike-specific antibodies would mop up any spike proteins in the blood, thereby protecting the blood vessels. They argued that this demonstrated that vaccinating people against the spike protein is a good thing.
However, the authors are not immunologists and they failed to recognize the limitations of their own study in drawing these kinds of conclusions. Specifically, they did not recognize that in a naïve individual receiving a mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, there are no antibodies; either pre-existing in the host, or in the vaccine formulation. In fact, it will take many days for the antibody response to be induced and for titers to begin reaching substantial concentrations. This leaves a large window of time in which any free spike proteins could exert their biological functions/harm in the body before there are any antibodies to neutralize them. Worse, most of the spike proteins should be expressed by our own cells. In that case, the antibodies will target and kill them in a form of autoimmunity. The authors of the paper forgot that their model was in the context of natural infection, where vaccination would precede exposure to SARS-CoV-2. In that case, I agree that there would be pre-existing antibodies that could neutralize spike proteins of viral origin entering the circulation. This was perceived to be one of the ‘strongest’ arguments used by others to try to discredit me. The reality is that it is completely incorrect and represents an embarrassing misinterpretation by the authors of the original paper and the many ‘fact-checkers’ that believed them without question.
Criminal Harassment
You have allowed colleagues to harass me endlessly for many consecutive months. They have lied about me, cal ed me many names, and have even accused me of being responsible for deaths. I submitted a harassment claim and your administrators ruled that it did not meet the bar of civil harassment. In stark contrast, I have been contacted by members of off-campus policing agencies who have told me that it exceeds the minimum bar of criminal harassment. I am sorry, but a faculty member can only take so much bullying and see such a lack of adherence to scientific and bioethical principles before it becomes necessary to speak up. Under your watch, you have allowed my life to be ruined by turning a blind eye to on-campus bullying, ignoring our campus principles of promoting mental well-being and a workplace in which I can feel safe. In addition to this you have banned me from the campus because I have robust, broadly protective, and long-lasting immunity against SARS-CoV-2 but lack a piece of paper suggesting that it was obtained via two injections.
Did you see this front page of one of Canada’s major newspapers?
…remarkably, the on-campus COVID-19 policies you are promoting fuel this kind of pure hatred from people, most of whom have not confirmed their own immunity status, against someone like me who is immune to SARS-CoV-2!!! Does that make any sense? My workplace has become a poisoned environment where the bullying, harassment, and hatred against me have been incessant. Are you ever going to put an end to the childish and irrational behaviours being demonstrated by our colleagues? I have received thousands of emails from around the world that indicate the university should be embarrassed and ashamed to allow such childish behaviour from faculty members to go unchecked in front of the public.
I have invested a decade of my life into the University of Guelph. I have conducted myself professionally and worked to an exceptional y high standard. I have consistently received excellent ratings for my research, teaching, and service. I have received rave reviews from students for my teaching. I have received prestigious research and teaching awards. I have brought funding to our campus from agencies that had never partnered with the University of Guelph in our institution’s history. I have brought in
$1 million-worth of equipment to improve our infrastructure, etc., etc. I am a man of integrity and a devoted public servant. I want to make Canada a better place for my family and for my fellow Canadians. We are a public institution. My salary is covered by taxpayers. This declared pandemic involves science that is in my ‘wheelhouse’. Since the beginning, I have made myself available to answer questions coming from the public in a fashion that is unbiased and based solidly on the ever-exploding scientific literature. My approach has not changed. Has some of it contradicted the very narrow public health narrative carried by mainstream media? Yes. Does that make it wrong? No. I will stand by my track record. When Health Canada authorized the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine I, along with two colleagues, wrote an open letter requesting that this vaccine not be used, in part on the grounds that it was being investigated for a link to potentially fatal blood clots in many European countries. I was accused at that time by so-called ‘fact checkers’ of providing misinformation. Less than two months later, Canada suspended the AstraZeneca vaccination program because it was deemed to be too unsafe as a result of causing blood clots that cost the unnecessary loss of lives of Canadians. More recently, I was heavily criticized for raising concerns in a short radio interview about a potential link between the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and heart inflammation in young people, especially males. This is now a well recognized problem that has been officially listed as a potential side-effect of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. It was also the subject of a recent Public Health Ontario Enhanced Epidemiological Summary Report highlighting the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis to young males following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. As such, I have a proven track record of accurately identifying concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines.
A Lack of Safety Data in Pregnant Females as Another Example of Why Vaccines Should Not be Mandated
I would like to give another disconcerting safety-related example of why a COVID-19 vaccine mandate could be dangerous. We have pregnant individuals or those who would like to become pregnant on campus. There was a highly publicized study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine that formed the foundation of declaring COVID-19 vaccines safe in pregnant females (https://www.nejm.org/doi/ful /10.1056/nejmoa2104983). The authors of this study declared that there was no risk of increased miscarriage to vaccinated females. This study resulted in many policies being instituted to promote vaccination of this demographic, for which the bar for safety should be set extremely high.
Did you know that this apparent confirmation of safety had to be rescinded recently because the authors performed an obvious mathematical error? I witnessed several of my colleagues from Canada and other countries bravely push for a review of this paper under withering negative pressures. Once the editor finally agreed to do so, the authors had no choice but to admit that made a mathematical error. Most of the world does not realize this. This admission of using an inappropriate mathematical formula can be found here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/ful /10.1056/NEJMx210016. This means that the major rationale for declaring COVID-19 vaccines safe in pregnant females is gone! How can someone force a COVID-19 vaccine on a pregnant female when there are insufficient safety data available to justify it?
Advocating for the Vulnerable and Those Fearful of Retribution
My concern is not primarily for myself. I am using my case to highlight how wrong your vaccine mandate is. I am more concerned for the more vulnerable on our campus. I hold tenure, and if ever there was a time when this was important, it is now. However, I have had to bear witness to numerous horrible situations for students and staff members. Students have been physically escorted off our campus, sometimes being removed from their residence, sometimes with their parents also being escorted off. Staff members have been escorted off campus and immediately sent home on indefinite leaves without pay, leaving them unable to adequately care for their families.
In many of these situations it seemed like the interactions intentionally occurred in very public settings with it being made clear to all onlookers that the person or people were not vaccinated. Parents have been denied attending meetings with their children who are entering the first year of a program. They recognize that adult learners would normally not have their parents accompany them, but we are living in unusual times with excessive and unfair (arguably illegal?) pressures being applied and these parents are entitled to advocate and defend the best interests of their sons and daughters.
Many students have deferred a year in the desperate hope that our campus community will not be so draconian next year. Others fought hard to earn their way into very competitive programs and are not being guaranteed re-entry next year. Many faculty members refused to offer on-line learning options for those who did not wish to be vaccinated.
On the flip-side, there are also faculty members, like many students and staff, who are completely demoralized. This includes some who were happily vaccinated but are upset by the draconian measures of your COVID-19 policies and/or will be unwilling to receive future booster shots. I can tell you many stories of students and staff members who couldn’t resist the pressure to get vaccinated because they were losing vast amounts of sleep and experiencing incredible anxiety and were on the verge of mental and/or physical breakdowns. In some of these cases, they were crying uncontrollably before, during, and after their vaccination, which they only agreed to under great duress. This does not represent informed consent!
I have had several members of our campus community contact me with concerns that they may have suffered vaccine-induced injuries ranging from blood clots to chest pain to vision problems to unexpected and unusual vaginal bleeding. Can I prove these were due to the vaccine? No. But can anyone prove they were not? No. And it is notable that these are common events reported in adverse event reporting systems around the world. In all cases, the attending physicians refused to report these events, even though it is supposed to be a current legal requirement to do so. These people obediently got vaccinated and were then abandoned when they became cases that did not help sell the current public health messaging.
A World Where Everyone is Vaccinated Looks Nothing Like Normal
The two-week lockdown that was supposed to lead into learning to live with SARS-CoV-2 has turned into the most mismanaged crisis in the history of our current generations. I ask you to look around with a very critical eye. You just reported that 99% of the campus community is vaccinated. Congratulations, you have far exceeded the stated standard for what is apparently the new goal of ‘herd vaccination’. I cannot use the typical term ‘herd immunity’ here because immunity is not being recognized as legitimate; only inferred immunity based on receiving two needles counts. We were told that achieving herd immunity by vaccination alone was the solution to this declared pandemic. This has been achieved on our campus in spades. I sat in on our town hall meetings with our local medical officer of health who confidently told us that the risk of breakthrough infections in the vaccinated was almost zero. Why, then are people so petrified of the unvaccinated. Look at vaccines for travellers going to exotic locations.
These are vaccines of some quality. Travellers take these vaccines, and not only do they not avoid the prospective pathogen, but they happily travel to the location where it is endemic (i.e. they enthusiastically enter the danger zone because they are protected). So, what does our campus look like with almost every person vaccinated? Everyone must remain masked and physically distanced. There is no gathering or loitering allowed in stairwells or any open spaces in buildings or outside. People are still being told which doors to enter and exit, when they can do so, where to stand in line, when to move. Incredibly, time restrictions are even being implemented in some eating areas because some students were deemed to be “snacking too long” with their masks off and, therefore, putting others at risk of death. In short, the on-campus COVID-19 policies are even more draconian than they were last year, but everyone is vaccinated. It doesn’t seem like the vaccines are working very well when a fully vaccinated campus cannot ease up on restrictions.
But, of course, we already know how poorly these vaccines are performing. Based on fundamental immunological principles, parenteral administration of these vaccines provides robust enough systemic antibody responses to allow these antibodies to spill over into the lower respiratory tract, which is a common point at which pathogens can enter systemic circulation due to the proximity of blood vessels to facilitate gas exchange. However, they do not provide adequate protection to the upper respiratory tract, like natural infection does, or like an intranasal or aerosolized vaccine likely would. As such, people whose immunity has been conferred by a vaccine only are often protected from the most severe forms of COVID-19 due to protection in the lower lungs, but they are also susceptible to proliferation of the virus in the upper airways, which causes them to shed equivalent quantities of SARS-CoV-2 as those who completely lack immunity. Dampened disease with equal shedding equals a phenotype that approaches that of a classic super-spreader; something that we erroneously labelled healthy children as until the overwhelming scientific evidence, which matches our historical understanding, clarified that this was not the case.
I have been in meetings where faculty have demanded to know who the unvaccinated students will be in their classes so they can make them sit at the back of the classroom! I can’t believe that some of my colleagues are thinking of resorting to the type of segregation policies that heroes like Viola Desmond, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Carrie M. Best, and Lulu Anderson fought so hard against so many years ago.
The Exemption Fiasco
With respect to exemptions for COVID-19 vaccines, the University of Guelph provided a number based on creed or religion but then, remarkably, rescinded these. These previously exempt individuals were required to resubmit applications using a more onerous form; many that had been honoured previously were rejected upon re- submission. Many have been rejected since. Based on the reports I have received from many people these rejections of exemption requests were typically not accompanied by explanations. Nor have many been told, despite asking, who it is that sits on the committee making decisions about these exemptions.
I would never be allowed to assign marks to students anonymously, nor without being able to justify them. Yet there seems to be a lack of transparency with exemptions and many of these decisions are destroying people’s lives; the outcomes are not trivial. Could you please disclose the names of the people serving on the University of Guelph’s committee that reviews exemptions? Also, could this committee please provide to applicants, retroactively, comments to justify their decisions? I have even heard it said in recent meetings that a lot of people are happy to hear that exemptions, including some medical exemptions are being denied. Why are our faculty celebrating refusals of medical exemptions for students?
A Lack of Consultation with the Experts on Vaccines
You have stated on numerous occasions that your COVID-19 policies have only been implemented after extensive consultation with local and regional experts. Interestingly, however, you have refused, for some unknown reason, to consult with any of the senior non-administrative immunologists on your campus. I would like to remind you that vaccinology is a sub-discipline of immunology. Notably, all three of us have offered repeatedly to serve on COVID-19 advisory committees, both on-campus and for our local public health unit, which also lacks advanced training in immunology and virology. The three of us have stayed on top of the cutting-edge scientific findings relevant to COVID-19 and meeting regularly with many national and international collaborative groups of scientists and physicians to debate and discuss what we are learning. I think it is notable that the senior non-administrative immunologists unanimously agree that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandated for our campus based on extensive, legitimate scientific and safety reasons.
Mandating COVID-19 Vaccines is Criminal
I am no legal expert but have consulted with many lawyers who have told me that these vaccine mandates break many existing laws. Here is one example copied from the Criminal Code of Canada: Extortion • 346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done. In your case, you are demanding that members of our academic community submit to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine against their will (a medical procedure that may very well be unnecessary and carry enhanced risk of harm) or face banishment from the campus. Again, I am not an expert in this area, but I am confident there will be lawyers willing to test this in court. Those responsible for issuing vaccine mandates will need to decide how confident they are that they will not lose these legal battles.
Integrity of Teaching
In this new world where followers of scientific data are vilified, I also worry about my ability to teach with integrity. Unbelievably, the Minister of Health of Canada, Patty Hajdu, told Canadians that vitamin D being a critical and necessary component of the immune system in its ability to clear intracellular pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 is fake news! Do you now that I have taught all my students about the importance of vitamin D (often in the historical context of how it was discovered as being critical for positive outcomes in patients with tuberculosis that were quarantined in sanatoriums).
I also teach the concept of herd immunity, with vaccination being a valuable tool to achieve this. I do not teach the concept of ‘herd vaccination’ while promoting ignorance of natural immunity. There are other basic immunological principles that I teach that have either not been recognized during the pandemic as legitimate scientific principles or they have been altogether contradicted by public health and/or government officials. Will I still be allowed to teach immunology according to the decades of scientific information that I have built my course upon? Or will I be disciplined for teaching immunological facts? There are many attempts to regulate what I can and cannot say these days, so these are serious questions.
Instilling Fear of a Minority Group Breeds Hatred
We live in an era where issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion are supposed to be at the forefront of all discussions at academic institutions. However, you are openly discriminating against and excluding a subset of our community that happens to be highly enriched with people engendered with critical thinking; a quality that we are supposed to be nurturing and promoting. With COVID-19 mandates, an environment has been created on our university campus that promotes hatred, bullying, segregation, and fear of a minority group whose only wrongdoing has been to maintain critical thinking and decision-making that is based on facts and common sense. I have yet to meet an anti-vaxxer on our campus. Everyone I know of is simply against the mismanagement of exceptionally poor- quality COVID-19 vaccines. History tells us that instilling fear of a minority group never ends well. This scenario must be rectified immediately if our campus is ever to return to a safe and secure working and learning environment for all.
Committing to Abolishing the COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate
President Yates, the favour of a reply is requested. Not the kind that defers to public health officials, or a committee, or anyone else. Instead, a reply with the scientific rigour expected from a scholarly colleague rebutting each of my comments and addressing each question. Surely, you know the science underpinning COVID-19 vaccines inside and out by now. I strongly suspect that nobody would made a decision that disrupts an entire community and destroys the lives of some of its members without a fully developed rationale that can point to the weight of the peer-reviewed scientific literature to back it up. If it would be easier, I would be happy to have an open and respectful, but public and blunt moderated conversation about your vaccine mandate in front of our campus community; much like in the spirit of old-fashioned, healthy scientific debates. You can have your scientific and medical advisors attend and I will invite an equal number.
I am not saying this to be challenging. I honestly think it would be a great way to educate our campus community and expose them to the full spectrum of the science. And, if I am as wrong as my ‘fact checkers’ say, I would love for them to demonstrate this for my own sake as much as anyone else’s. So far, despite hundreds of invitations, not one person has done this in a scenario where I can respond in real-time. You need to understand; all I want is my life back and to be able to recognize my country again. I want to see the lives of the students, staff, and other faculty members that I have seen destroyed be restored again. I want to be able to return to my workplace and not be fearful of being hated or exposed to social, mental, and physical bullying. Instead, I want to be able to turn my talents and full attention back to being an academic public servant who can design better ways to treat diseases and help train Canada’s next generation of scientific and medical leaders. I simply cannot know all that I have shared in this letter and have suffered as much as I have and be silent about it.
My great uncles and family members before them served heroically in the World Wars to ensure Canada would remain a great and free democracy. I think they would be horrified by what they see in Canada today. Indeed, many of my friends who immigrated from Communist countries or countries run by dictatorships are sharing fears about the direction our country is heading; it is reminding them of what they fled from. Further, mandating COVID-19 sets a scary precedent.
Did you know that multiplex tests for both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses are on the horizon, along with dual- purpose vaccines that will use the same mRNA-based technology to simultaneously target SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses (https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/moderna-developing-single-dose-covid-19-flu-combo- vaccine-1.5578445). Rhetorically, will the University of Guelph consider masking, distancing, and/or mandating vaccines for influenza in the future? Please rescind your COVID-19 vaccine mandate immediately. It is doing more harm than good. Unbelievably, among many other problems, it is even discriminating against those who can prove they are immune to SARS-CoV-2!
Mandating COVID-19 Vaccines Creates Absurd Situations
In closing, and to highlight the absurdity of mandating COVID-19 vaccines… President Yates, I have proven to you that I am immune to SARS-CoV-2, but you have banned me from the campus and ruined my life because I don’t have a piece of paper saying that someone saw two needles go into my shoulder. You have a piece of paper that says that someone saw two needles go into your shoulder, but you have not proven that you are immune to SARS-CoV-2. However, you are allowed on campus and your life can proceed uninterrupted. How is that fair?
Respectfully and in the mutual interest of the health and well-being of all members of our community,
Dr. Byram W. Bridle, PhD
Associate Professor of Viral Immunology
Department of Pathobiology
University of Guelph
Sergei Kovalyov, who died this week, was a controversial figure. A Soviet dissident who became Russia’s first Presidential Human Rights Commissioner, Kovalyov provoked intense reactions. To his admirers he was a principled defender of human rights and democracy, a man of enormous courage who faced down first the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. To his detractors, he was a Westernizing zealot devoid of any patriotic feeling who betrayed his country and its soldiers by taking the side of Chechen terrorists. In a sense, Kovalyov embodied the triumphs and tribulations of Russian liberalism, and as such his life deserves a closer look.
Sergei Kovalyov
A high proportion of Soviet dissidents were scientists, and Kovalyov, a biologist by training, was no exception. Nikita Khrushchev put a great emphasis on science as the means by which Soviet society would catch up and overtake the West, and consequently scientists were given a fair amount of intellectual independence in order to pursue new discoveries. This provided fertile ground for the growth of dissident thinking.
The scientific mindset helped shape the dissident movement. It brought with it Enlightenment humanism (influenced to some degree by the more humanistic elements of Marxist thought) and a form of scientific positivism that saw human society as being driven by the same sort of laws that determined chemistry and physics. This produced a historical determinism that saw society as inevitably heading towards a given goal, which for those imbued with Marxism-Leninism was communism, but which for some others, such as Kovalyov, was Western-style liberal democracy. One might say that just a Marx flipped Hegel on his head, Soviet liberals flipped Marx on his head to discover a new “End of History”, personified by the West. This gave them the sense of confidence they needed to oppose the Soviet regime, and, in some cases, a certain dogmatism that led them to believe that the ends justified the means in the pursuit of the inevitable liberal and democratic future.
Kovalyov fitted well within this paradigm. As his biographer Emma Gilligan writes, his “morality was founded on a rational philosophy that stemmed from a scientific worldview and he shared the enlightenment practice of questioning authority.” His views were “rationalistic humanism … with their emphasis on positive law.” Kovalyov’s “scientific worldview” and “rationalistic humanism” rendered him a cosmopolitan who valued individual humans more than social constructs such as nations. He described himself as an “anti-patriot”. As we shall see, this proved to be his eventual undoing.
After losing his job at Moscow State University, he worked at an experimental fish hatchery in Kalinin (Tver) before being arrested and imprisoned in 1974. His arrest owed itself to the two years he spent editing The Chronicle of Current Events, an underground publication that surveyed abuses of human rights in the Soviet Union, including the Soviet practice of locking dissidents up in psychiatric hospitals on the spurious grounds that they were insane. It was this work that would rightly entrench Kovalyov’s reputation as a courageous defender of human rights and individual liberty.
Kovalyov in prison
After seven years in a strict-regime prison camp, and three years of internal exile, Kovalyov was freed in 1984, just in time for the start of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika one year later. His attitude to perestroika put him at the more moderate end of the dissident spectrum. This had been true even when editing The Chronicle, when as Gilligan says, “Kovalyov argued against … a simple line between ‘us and them’.”
In my last post, I discussed how some Russian liberals tend to blame the country’s problems on a small band of crooks who have usurped the state, while others blame the Russian people as a whole. Kovalyov belonged the second group. He wrote: “Totalitarianism is not only government pressure over society. It consists also of a society that displays a readiness to submit itself to that violence and even to assist in state terror.” Given this belief, he felt that simply opposing the Soviet regime and seeking to topple it was pointless. Regime and people were equally responsible for the fate of the country and needed to work together to improve it.
Kovalyov’s position was controversial in dissident groups. Fellow dissident Alexander Podrabinek, for instance, complained to him that: “You cannot attempt to place moral responsibility for the crimes of the regime on everyone. … This government was never ours. … The majority of the people in our country cannot and must not be held responsible for the crimes of the regime.” Kovalyov, however, argued that, “not all compromises are dishonest. If I agree with something I am ready for conscientious cooperation.” To this end, in 1987 he created the group Press Klub Glasnost which, against opposition from dissidents such as Podrabinek and Valeriia Novodvorskaia, passed a resolution saying that, “We consider it essential to continue persistent attempts to establish a dialogue between the human rights movement in the USSR and the authorities … we from our side are prepared in all good faith to establish cooperation with the authorities at all levels.”
This is, I think, something that Kovalyov’s conservative detractors miss: Kovalyov showed a willingness to work with the authorities, not to seek their destruction.
This applied equally to the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, one might say that Kovalyov, like so many Russian liberals, took his support for Yeltsin too far. The passionate commitment to democracy and human rights led him and many others to tolerate, even encourage, the creation of an authoritarian order in the early 1990s, a move he would later regret.
So it was that following the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, Kovalyov supported banning of the Communist Party, providing expert testimony to the Constitutional Court that the party and the KGB were one and the same. Later, he supported Yeltsin when he sent tanks to attack the Russian parliament in October 1993. He said:
“There is no doubt that the victory of [parliament’s leader Ruslan] Khasbulatov and his supporters … would have meant the end of democracy, the end of parliamentarism, and the final result, the end of freedom in Russia … For my entire life I have tried to fight against the arbitrariness of power. But I am firmly prepared to defend these rights from a crowd of pogromshchiki, from a possessed crowd whose leaders have passed guns to them.”
Yeltsin had acted on the will of the people when he dissolved parliament, said Kovalyov, adding that, “The President by definition must be the guarantor of constitutionalism. But what is constitutionalism – following the letter of a bad law or the fundamental principles of constitutionalism?”
The contradiction between this and Kovalyov the defender of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, is of course striking. He was at least aware that there was a problem. “Haven’t we resorted to the principle of revolutionary expediency?” he asked, “I hope that the present precedent will not become [parliamentarism’s] tombstone.”
Before long, he would decide that indeed it had.
In June 1990, Kovalyov was appointed Chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Russian Supreme Soviet (the same body whose physical destruction he would later celebrate). In September 1993, Yeltsin also appointed him head of the new Presidential Human Rights Commission. As such, he was responsible for examining the condition of human rights in the Russian Federation, receiving citizens’ complaints, and making suggestions for improvements.
Beyond this, Kovalyov also made a significant contribution to Russian law by drafting Section 2 “On the Rights and Liberties of Man and the Citizen” of the new Russian Constitution that came into effect in late 1993. Section 2 gives the Russian Constitution a distinctly liberal feel, guaranteeing Russian citizens a host of civil and political rights, and unlike the old Soviet constitution makes these rights unconditional, not dependent on citizens’ fulfilment of their obligations or on compatibility with the advancement of the cause of communism. This was perhaps Kovalyov’s greatest achievement. For this alone, he deserves his place in the pantheon of Russian statesmen.
Before long, however, his relationship with the Russian state collapsed into a condition of mutual acrimony.
There were multiple causes. One was the increasingly authoritarian methods used by Boris Yeltsin’s government. Kovalyov objected, for instance, to Yeltsin’s 1994 Decree “On Urgent Measures to Protect Citizens against Banditry and Organized Crime,” saying that it violated the constitution on several counts, such as its articles allowing for warrantless searches and prolonged detention without charge. It’s worth highlighting this case, as it indicates how the Yeltsin government started abusing the Russian constitution before its ink was barely dry. The idea that the 1990s were a liberal paradise that was then destroyed by Vladimir Putin is a little hard to sustain.
The second cause of Kovalyov’s break with the Yeltsin government was the First Chechen War, that started at the end of 1994. Kovalyov called this an “act of terrorism against the Chechen people.” After travelling to Grozny to observe events, he was shocked to see how Russian forces indiscriminate shelling was killing large numbers of civilians. He noted:
“The firing, perhaps, is directed at military targets, but the strikes are falling on people’s homes. I have seen the destruction of people’s homes with my own eyes. I have seen the corpses of peaceful citizens, clearly not combatants. … What is happening is clearly an enormous tragedy. … The Chechen nation, like any nation, can make mistakes in its choice of leader and ideals. But this does not give anyone the right to conduct a debate with them in the language of bombing and bombardment.”
Kovalyov demonstrating against the war in Chechnya
It was at this point that Kovalyov sealed his fate. It’s worth remembering that his job was to defend human rights, not to support government policy. And he took the job seriously. Seeing the massive human rights abuses taking place in Chechnya, he determined that a ceasefire was necessary. But a ceasefire inevitably favoured the Chechen rebels, as it would leave them in control of most of Chechnya. Because of this, many in Russia concluded that Kovalyov was actively supporting the Chechens against his own people.
Kovalyov deepened this impression by visiting the bunker of Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev, where he and others found themselves stuck after Russian forces launched an assault on Grozny. It was at this point that Kovalyov is said to done something that forever tarnished his reputation in Russia: supposedly he urged surrounded Russian troops to surrender to the Chechens, guaranteeing their safety if they did (something he was, of course, unable to do). From that moment on, in the eyes of many Russians, Kovalyov was little more than a traitor.
The result was a huge political storm when Kovalyov returned to Moscow. Deputies in the Russian parliament, the State Duma, lined up to condemn him. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for instance, ranted:
“Who is he defending? The bandits, rapists and troublemakers…people who are fighting against our Constitution, our State, with weapons in their hands! And millions of citizens have suffered. Suffered from the disintegration of the USSR as a result of the activity of his political movement… Why wasn’t he monitoring human rights violations in our city? Why was he sitting in a basement in a city where a war is going on?”
It’s worth pointing out that the State Duma in 1994, though dominated by Communists and Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, had a much stronger liberal representation than it does today. Yet even then, a strong patriotic mood, and a tendency to denounce political opponents as traitors, were obvious. Once again, the idea that this mood is a creation of Putin is, in retrospect, a myth.
In response to the attacks, Kovalyov dug his grave further. “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said on TV, an idea he reiterated some years later, telling an interviewer, “I am an anti-patriot. I really do not like what is called patriotism and think it is a socially harmful idea.”
One can argue about whether Kovalyov is right. But politically speaking, his anti-patriotism was politically fatal. The State Duma voted to dismiss him from his position as parliamentary human rights commissioner. For a little while, though, he remained in his presidential post, a fact which led him to the final controversial incident of his career – the Budyonnovsk hospital siege.
In June 1995, Chechen terrorists, led by Shamil Basayev, seized a hospital in the town of Budyonnovsk in southern Russia, taking up to 2,000 people hostage. Kovalyov then negotiated their release. Under the terms of the agreement, Basayev let the hostages go, and in return was allowed to leave Budyonnovsk safely. To guarantee the agreement, 100 volunteers went with him as hostages. Kovalyov joined their number.
One has to admire Kovalyov’s courage, putting his own life on the line to ensure the release of other hostages. Even this, though, wasn’t enough to satisfy his opponents. Kovalyov’s deal allowed Basayev to get away with his act of terrorism. To some, it was proof once again that Kovalyov was on the side of the terrorists. The fact that Dudayev awarded Kovalyov a medal and that Dudayev’s wife described Kovalyov as her favorite politician didn’t help.
By January 1996, Kovalyov had had enough, and resigned as head of the Presidential Human Rights Commision. He wrote to Yeltsin:
“I can’t go on working with a president whom I believe to be neither a supporter of democracy nor a guarantee of the rights and liberties of my fellow citizens. … Life has always been cheap in Russia, especially under the Bolsheviks. But you introduced a new ‘democratic’ and ‘humanitarian’ strain into this shameful national tradition. For a whole year in Chechnya you have been restoring ‘constitutional order’ and ‘civil rights’ with bombs and missiles.”
Kovalyov called Yeltsin a “constitutional criminal.” He said:
“The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither in Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region; it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces – those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB – who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now … the goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire population: ‘The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order into this country, and we’ll do it whatever the cost’.”
Kovalyov’s story tells us much about the fate of Russian liberalism. In its determination to extirpate the remnants of the communist system, it threw itself 100% behind Boris Yeltsin in his struggle against the then parliament, the Supreme Soviet, and celebrated his use of force to defeat his opponents. It was then shocked to discover that the new order it had created was not the liberal democratic order it had imagined. Committed to the rule of law, it turned a blind eye to it when it suited them, and then threw up its arms in horror when Yeltsin’s army revealed its utter unconcern for the rule of law during the war in Chechnya. While seeking to save lives and end the violence, Russian liberalism proved completely out of touch with the patriotic feelings of most Russians, who didn’t like the war in Chechnya but viewed the Chechen rebels as bandity, bandits or terrorists, and couldn’t tolerate any note of sympathy for them. Kovalyov proved unable to find some sort of language that would condemn the indiscriminate use of force by the government but also condemn the terrorism of the government’s enemies. In the process, he and other liberals inadvertently destroyed liberalism’s reputation by smearing it with the “anti-patriotic” label.
Of course, one may argue that any other approach would have been unprincipled. Indeed, Kovalyov’s career speaks to a man of enormous principle, willing to endure great sacrifices in order to build a better society. His contribution to human rights, especially to the 1993 Constitution, merits high praise. But his career speaks also to the fact that the “authoritarian” regime attributed to Vladimir Putin was firmly in place already by the early 1990s, to the fact that Russian liberals themselves helped construct this regime, and also to Russian liberalism’s fatal tendency to portray itself as anti-patriotic to the bone. It was Kovalyov’s tragedy that a life dedicated to the promotion of human rights ultimately led to his rejection by the people he sought to serve.
Alexandria, VA — Daniel Everette Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty to sharing classified documents about US Military drone programs with a reporter was just sentenced to 45 months in Federal Prison. Ahead of his sentencing Hale’s lawyers submitted an 11-page letter handwritten by Daniel from his jail cell to US District Judge Liam O’Grady. Hale’s deeply personal letter paints a gruesome picture of the US Drone Program, and explains in detail how it was a crisis of conscience that led Hale to leak secrets about the program to a reporter.
Below is Daniel Everette Hale’s letter to Judge Liam O’Grady in its entirety:
Dear Judge O’Grady,
Former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Everette Hale, 2012
It is not a secret that I struggle to live with depression and post traumatic stress disorder. Both stem from my childhood experience growing up in a rural mountain community and were compounded by exposure to combat during military service. Depression is a constant. Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways. The tell-tale signs of a person afflicted by PTSD and depression can often be outwardly observed and are practically universally recognizable. Hard lines about the face and jaw. Eyes, once bright and wide, now deepset and fearful. And an inexplicably sudden loss of interest in things that used to spark joy. These are the noticeable changes in my demeanor marked by those who knew me before and after military service. To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history. To better appreciate the significance of how this came to pass, I would like to explain my experience deployed to Afghanistan as it was in 2012 and how it is I came to violate the Espionage Act, as a result.
In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants. To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator, would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed.
Daniel Hale’s deeply personal letter paints a gruesome picture of the US Drone Program, and explains in detail how it was a crisis of conscience that led him to leak secrets about the program to a reporter.
The first time that I witnessed a drone strike came within days of my arrival to Afghanistan. Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika provence around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea. That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, muchless within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.
Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair. Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions. By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men—whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify—in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Nevermind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.
Nevertheless, in spite of my better instincts, I continued to follow orders and obey my command for fear of repercussion. Yet, all the while, becoming increasingly aware that the war had very little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors. The evidence of this fact was laid bare all around me. In the longest or most technologically advanced war in American history, contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary. Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute. Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood—theirs and ours. When I think about this I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I’ve done to support it.
The most harrowing day of my life came months into my deployment to Afghanistan when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster. For weeks we had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad. Car bombs directed at US bases had become an increasingly frequent and deadly problem that summer, so much effort was put into stopping them. It was a windy and clouded afternoon when one of the suspects had been discovered headed eastbound, driving at a high rate of speed. This alarmed my superiors who believe he might be attempting to escape across the border into Pakistan.
A US drone strike on a civilian vehicle believed to be carrying a Taliban leader in Afghanistan
A drone strike was our only chance and already it began lining up to take the shot. But the less advanced predator drone found it difficult to see through clouds and compete against strong headwinds. The single payload MQ-1 failed to connect with its target, instead missing by a few meters. The vehicle, damaged, but still driveable, continued on ahead after narrowly avoiding destruction. Eventually, once the concern of another incoming missile subsided, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka. As astounding as it was to have just learned there had been a woman, possibly his wife, there with the man we intended to kill moments ago, I did not have the chance to see what happened next before the drone diverted its camera when she began frantically to pull out something from the back of the car.
A couple of days passed before I finally learned from a briefing by my commanding officer about what took place. There indeed had been the suspect’s wife with him in the car. And in the back were their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3 years old. A cadre of Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had stopped the following day. It was there they found them placed in the dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated. As my commanding officer relayed this information to us she seemed to express disgust, not for the fact that we had errantly fired on a man and his family, having killed one of his daughters; but for the suspected bomb maker having ordered his wife to dump the bodies of their daughters in the trash, so that the two of them could more quickly escape across the border. Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.
One year later, at a farewell gathering for those of us who would soon be leaving military service, I sat alone, transfixed by the television, while others reminisced together. On television was breaking news of the president giving his first public remarks about the policy surrounding the use of drone technology in warfare. His remarks were made to reassure the public of reports scrutinizing the death of civilians in drone strikes and the targeting of American citizens. The president said that a high standard of “near certainty” needed to be met in order to ensure that no civilians were present. But from what I knew, of the instances where civilians plausibly could have been present, those killed were nearly always designated enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise. Nonetheless, I continued to heed his words as the president went on to explain how a drone could be used to eliminate someone who posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. Using the analogy of taking out a sniper, with his sights set on an unassuming crowd of people, the president likened the use of drones to prevent a would-be terrorist from carrying out his evil plot. But, as I understood it to be, the unassuming crowd had been those who lived in fear and the terror of drones in their skies and the sniper in this scenario had been me. I came to believe that the policy of drone assasiniation was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing what I’d been a part of, I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong.
I dedicated myself to anti-war activism, and was asked to partake in a peace conference in Washington, DC late November, 2013. People had come together from around the world to share experiences about what it is like living in the age of drones. Fazil bin Ali Jaber had journeyed from Yemen to tell us of what happened to his brother Salem bin Ali Jaber and their cousin Waleed. Waleed had been a policeman and Salem was a well-respected firebrand Imam, known for giving sermons to young men about the path towards destruction should they choose to take up violent jihad.
A US drone strike on a civilian vehicle, similar to the harrowing incident described by Fazil
One day in August 2012, local members of Al Qaeda traveling through Fazil’s village in a car spotted Salem in the shade, pulled up towards him, and beckoned him to come over and speak to them. Not one to miss an opportunity to evangelize to the youth, Salem proceeded cautiously with Waleed by his side. Fazil and other villagers began looking on from afar. Farther still was an ever present reaper drone looking too.
As Fazil recounted what happened next, I felt myself transported back in time to where I had been on that day, 2012. Unbeknownst to Fazil and those of his village at the time was that they had not been the only watching Salem approach the jihadist in the car. From Afghanistan, I and everyone on duty paused their work to witness the carnage that was about to unfold. At the press of a button from thousands of miles away, two hellfire missiles screeched out of the sky, followed by two more. Showing no signs of remorse, I, and those around me, clapped and cheered triumphantly. In front of a speechless auditorium, Fazil wept.
About a week after the peace conference I received a lucrative job offer if I were to come back to work as a government contractor. I felt uneasy about the idea. Up to that point, my only plan post military separation had been to enroll in college to complete my degree. But the money I could make was by far more than I had ever made before; in fact, it was more than any of my college-educated friends were making. So, after giving it careful consideration, I delayed going to school for a semester and took the job.
For a long time I was uncomfortable with myself over the thought of taking advantage of my military background to land a cushy desk job. During that time I was still processing what I had been through and I was starting to wonder if I was contributing again to the problem of money and war by accepting to return as a defense contractor. Worse was my growing apprehension that everyone around me was also taking part in a collective delusion and denial that was used to justify our exorbitant salaries, for comparatively easy labor. The thing I feared most at the time was the temptation not to question it.
Then it came to be that one day after work I stuck around to socialize with a pair of co-workers whose talented work I had come to greatly admire. They made me feel welcomed, and I was happy to have earned their approval. But then, to my dismay, our brand-new friendship took an unexpectedly dark turn. They elected that we should take a moment and view together some archived footage of past drone strikes. Such bonding ceremonies around a computer to watch so-called “war porn” had not been new to me. I partook in them all the time while deployed to Afghanistan. But on that day, years after the fact, my new friends gaped and sneered, just as my old one’s had, at the sight of faceless men in the final moments of their lives. I sat by watching too; said nothing and felt my heart breaking into pieces.
Daniel Everette Hale and Leila, December 2020
Your Honor, the truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called-upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured. The crux of PTSD is that it is a moral conundrum that afflicts invisible wounds on the psyche of a person made to burden the weight of experience after surviving a traumatic event. How PTSD manifests depends on the circumstances of the event. So how is the drone operator to process this? The victorious rifleman, unquestioningly remorseful, at least keeps his honor intact by having faced off against his enemy on the battlefield. The determined fighter pilot has the luxury of not having to witness the gruesome aftermath. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated?
My conscience, once held at bay, came roaring back to life. At first, I tried to ignore it. Wishing instead that someone, better placed than I, should come along to take this cup from me. But this too was folly. Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person.
So, I contacted an investigative reporter, with whom I had had an established prior relationship, and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.
Respectfully,
**Daniel Hale**
Somewhere over the Rainbow, something went terribly wrong... That is the title of my embroidery which you can see at the top of this page. Being a visual artist, I don't often explain my ideas and concepts in detail, leaving interpretations mostly up to the viewer. I found it necessary however to accompany my art with words on this occasion.
I’ve started and finished this post many times. Had friends read over and edit it, took a break to digest, then scrapped half of it. I have tried to replace anger with compassion and, finally, this is the version I feel ready to share with everybody who’d like to read it.
My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject. And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.
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I stumbled across the subject of gender identity ideology somewhat out of the blue about seven months ago and, after some initial research into it, I became really rather alarmed by the rise of accusations of bigotry and hatred aimed towards people who don’t buy into it.
‘It’ being the idea of a gender spectrum and sex as a social construct, rather than a biological reality. An Idea that seems to have gained a rather fanatical following and high visibility via social media over the past few years.
I had also been blissfully unaware of last year’s consultations by the English and Scottish Governments regarding the GRA (Gender Recognition Act) reform in respect of ‘self-ID’ (self identification) and the potential legal and human rights ramifications for women and girls. The implication being that if one can simply self-ID into womanhood, the single-sex protections of the 2010 equality act become completely null and void.
And so the issue has collided with my understanding of feminism and simply by being a feminist or part of certain circles, incorrect assumptions about my political beliefs are being made. With this post I seek to articulate my personal beliefs, so that I can defend and advocate for them.
I feel no animosity towards people who hold different beliefs to me, be they religious, gender identity ideology or any other kind of faith, and I hope you can extend the same courtesy to me.
Terminology
Definitions matter. Respecting people, matters. Criticising bad ideas also matters.
To express my convictions as clearly as possible, I have made a list of key words and their definitions as I understand them to be correct and have used in this essay.
A woman, is an adult human female. (Not an identity or feeling.)
Female is the sex of an organism that produces non-mobile ova (egg cells).
The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman". Barring rare medical conditions (DSD or Intersex), female humans have two X chromosomes.
Intersex is not transgender or non-binary. It is a rare medical condition. (Not an identity or a feeling.) In some current arguments Intersex conditions are being used to legitimise the idea of ‘being born in the wrong body’. However, most Intersex individuals do not wish to be included under the ‘trans-umbrella’. The aim of Intersex supporting charities is to demedicalise the condition, whereas Transgender support groups seek to gain easier and ever earlier access to medications and surgeries.
Cis [-gender] is a term invented to describe a person not struggling with their gender identity. Personally, I reject this prefix. Firstly, because I don’t have a ‘gender identity’ (as I do not believe in such a concept), and, secondly, describing me simply as a woman or female will suffice.
Sex is either of the two categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
It is not ‘assigned’, but rather observed at birth or often already in utero, based on external sex characteristics. Sex (not gender identity) is a protected characteristic under the law.
Humans can not change sex. If we ignore sex, we ignore sexism. This is important, particularly for women, living in sexist societies.
Femininity & masculinity refer to traits or characteristics typically associated with being female or male, respectively. Individuals usually possess both what are considered feminine and masculine attributes to various degrees, regardless of their sex.
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, femininity and masculinity.
Gender dysphoria (or ‘GD’) is a distressed mental state arising from a conflict between a person's perceived gender identity and the biological sex of the person.
Transwomen are biological males that choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women. There are similar examples in other cultures such as the fa'afafine in samoa - literally meaning ‘in the manner of’ (fa’a) ‘woman’ (fafine) - or the Hijra in south asia, as well as ‘Two Spirit’ for Indigenous North Americans, though these are seen as a third gender, rather than as literally the same as the female sex.
Transmen are biological females that choose to live as a man, or believe they actually are men. There are far fewer, in fact barely any examples at all of transmen in other cultures the world over. (Although there has been an enormous, inexplicable steep increase of young women being referred to gender clinics in the western world over the past decade.)
Non-binary is a term used by people who believe that gender is a spectrum rather than a binary, and states that they fall anywhere on this spectrum, or even ‘outside’ of the male-female dichotomy (I am still curious to know what ‘outside’ means).
Though I know some wonderful people who have come to embrace and re-define themselves by these terms and this ideology, I struggle with it for many reasons.
I struggle with this need to further categorise people into boxes: non-binary, a-gender, pan-gender, genderqueer, genderfluid, demiboy, demigirl etc. Instead of freeing us from the constrictions of socially imposed stereotypes this new system of categorising people actually imposes yet more new ones.
You are a butch girl? Must be non-binary. Feminine boy? Non-binary, or maybe trans. There appears to be no room for masculinity in women and femininity in men, and I don't find that very progressive.
How are any of these new labels any different to terms used to describe ‘character’, ‘personality’ and ‘expression’?
The proposition that people who don’t call themselves non-binary are any less on a spectrum between feminine and masculine traits seems entirely strange to me. I don’t know anybody who is a hundred percent male or female in their expression. I don’t even think its possible.
Furthermore, the idea that to be described as cis is to be treated as being privileged seems completely misplaced. Especially when talking about biological females who cannot simply identify out of oppression precisely because they are female (which is not an identity or feeling).
To hold these definitions and beliefs now often gets pejoratively called “biological essentialism”, as well as mean and hurtful.
None of the previous is intended as, or even just 'is', unkind or judgemental towards anybody, let alone mean.
The immutable biological qualities of females and males should not and do not determine or dictate whether or not you can create and design your own life as you wish. Feminists have argued this for a very long time.
But I really struggle with the increasing demands of having to validate somebody's idea of themselves, which is solely based on subjective feelings rather than objective realities.
It strikes me as a bad idea to demand others to bend or discard the facts of biological science, in favour of unjustified imposed mantras such as “transwomen are women”.
I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such. And I do not believe that these beliefs should override existing protections that are in place as a result of the biological realities of women, since their purpose is to relieve oppression based on women’s physicalities and reproductive functions (not identity or feelings).
Feelings don’t have human rights. Humans do.
I am also completely at a loss over Stonewall’s (the LGBTQ lobby group) updated description of transgender, seeing that, by their logic, almost anybody would fall under this category, including those that don’t identify as trans.
screenshot of Stonewall website
How is it acceptable for one group to self-identify (such as trans, non-binary, queer etc.) while also denying that right to others, when people (such as myself) do not accept the label cis?
“That includes people who do not self-identify as transgender, but who are perceived as such by others…”
How is it okay for an organisation in Stonewall’s position to categorise somebody as transgender, even if that person doesn’t do so themselves?
The Doctrine
The whole concept of gender identity shifts the onus onto everybody else, rather than being the responsibility of the self.
One is now kindly asked to play along with the Ideology of Gender Identity in the form of an ever growing list of new pronouns, identities and the validation of nebulous ‘facts’, or else be seen and labelled as hateful and bigotted.
It is an ideology because it is rooted in faith. A faith that I do not share. Let me explain.
The Ideology of Gender Identity doctrine (as I understand it and gathered from social media and personal conversations with proponents) is as follows:
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Transwomen literally are women, transmen literally are men. (They have simply been assigned the wrong sex at birth. So a transwoman’s penis is therefore a female sexual organ, and vice versa for transmen and their vaginas)
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Non-binary people exist and are ‘valid’ (this is an often repeated mantra)
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The dictionary definition of ‘woman’ (“an adult human female”) is ‘problematic’ and transphobic
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Biology is transphobic and exclusionary
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Men can get pregnant and give birth
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Women can ejaculate sperm and fertilise eggs
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There are no physical advantages for transwomen over cis-women in sport
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Allowing people to self-ID will have no impact on women’s rights in any way. The loopholes that would be created for predatory men to take advantage of are a figment of hateful and bigoted women’s imaginations. (Men never go to great lengths to access vulnerable women and being a member of a marginalised group automatically precludes anyone in it from wanting to do harm to others)
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Gender Identity is an inherent immutable quality that everybody has and only oneself can determine (unless Stonewall dictates otherwise). If one doesn’t have it, one gets assigned the label cis
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Gender Identity can be fluid, meaning one day you can feel like a woman, another day like a man, and another day like neither. (None of this will create any issues for accurate data collection to tackle gender inequalities)
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‘Woman’ is an identity or feeling rather than biological observable reality. ‘Man’ is an identity or feeling rather than biological observable reality. Therefore anybody should freely be able to access the services, changing rooms, toilets, sports teams, grants and shortlists, shelters and prison services that best correspond with their chosen gender, not sex. This won’t create any issues, because transpeople are literally the sex they say they are, and non-binary people can choose what suits them best
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Sex is a social construct that is arbitrarily assigned at birth
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Sex and gender are a spectrum
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Same sex attraction is trans-exclusionary
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Sexual attraction is based on socially constructed biases. Humans are attracted to genders, not to sex (alternatively, you are a vagina or penis fetishist and therefore transphobic)
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Transwomen who fancy women are lesbians
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Transmen who fancy men are gay
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Lesbians that don’t consider transwomen with a penis as a partner, are problematic and transphobic
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Misgendering is actual, literal violence
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Dead-naming (using a previous name of a person who has since changed their gender and name) is actual, literal violence
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Cis people have cis-privilege
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Transwomen are the most marginalised of all women
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Anybody who disagrees with any of these points, is a TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
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TERF’s are fascists and deserve to be hurt
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TERF’s are part of (or are funded by) the alt right
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TERF’s are not feminists
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Women who have concerns about sharing spaces and services designed for biological females, are actually, literally transphobic, exclusionary and elitist about the label women and are only hiding behind ‘concerns’ so that people can’t see how biggoted they really are. They don’t want transwomen to be part of their exclusive club
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Anybody who disagrees with any of these points is a transphobe who actually literally hates transpeople, and denies their existence
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To question any of these points is actual, literal violence, as questioning would erase somebody's existence
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No Debate!
I believe that is most of it but please correct me if I forgot something or misrepresented the doctrine in any way. This is my genuine attempt to rationalise and understand the code of belief.
The crux
I disagree with pretty much every single point of this doctrine. The conclusion of which for followers of the doctrine would be that I hate trans- and non-binary people. (I do not.)
That I am a narrow minded bigot. (I am not.)
That I am a facist; as bad as a Nazi; Tansphobic cis-scum; and deserve what’s coming my way if I don’t change my beliefs. (If twitter and other social media sites and their users are to be believed.)
Please, make your own conclusions.
But none of this will lead me to forgo and forget my human rights to assert my own personal boundaries and beliefs, without being ‘othered’ or name-called for doing so.
None of it stops me from worrying about what this entire reconstruction of words and meanings does for girls’ and women’s rights in particular.
None of it makes me worry less about the future of women's sports, because transwomen have an undeniable, proven physical advantage even after transitioning and hormone therapy. (There are obvious reasons for sex seggregation in sports, namely male physical advantage, which doesn’t go away with hormone treatment!)
None of it will stop me from worrying about the impact that normalising and validating the idea of being “born in the wrong body” has on young children and adolescents, who are being put on life-long medical paths and often rendered infertile due to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery due to this ideology.
And none of it will stop me from speaking out about this publicly, even though it may be detrimental to my opportunities as an artist, as well as some personal relationships.
It is not my intention to upset or limit the freedoms of friends, acquaintances or even strangers, nor do I wish to be ostracised, but I can not and will not compromise my artistic and personal integrity, in service of an oppressive and, increasingly, actually violent, dogmatic ideology.
When Ideas escalate
It’s clear that emotions run high and tribalism runs deep. And I find myself unable to go along with what now seems to be the only accepted narrative in ‘my circles’.
I find it quite concerning and, frankly, manipulative to read with increasing regularity of ‘gentle reminders’, or the insistence on ‘inclusive’ (or as I like to call it ‘reductive and dehumanising’) language.
The word women is replaced by ‘uterus-carriers’, ‘menstruators’, ‘vulva- havers’, ‘chest feeders’ and the absolute top-of-the-pops on my No Fucking Way list: ’NON-MEN’ (I wish that was a joke.)
It is uncannily reminiscent of black women’s history, when female slaves were dehumanised as ‘breeders’, or today’s billion dollar surrogate industry in India, where vulnerable women are literally used as incubators and called ‘carriers’.
I virtually never see anybody advocating for men, and transwomen by extension, to now be called ‘penis owner’, ‘people with penises’ or ‘prostate carrier’ and ‘ejaculator’ in the name of inclusion.
And here’s the rub: this entire issue is overwhelmingly asymmetric against one sex class.
A vocal British trans-rights advocate, born male, proclaimed that ‘centring’ reproductive systems (i.e. pussy hats, Big Swinging Ovaries accessories etc) at a women’s march is reductive and exclusionary (because transwomen do not have pussies or ovaries).
I disagree.
Women ‘centering’ and celebrating our reproductive organs is not only our right but, speaking as a woman myself, it is a way of reclaiming agency over body parts that are being legislated and shamed virtually everywhere in the world (for recent examples, see international abortion laws and Period shaming, though there are plenty more).
Meanwhile, T-shirts are being worn that say “Fuck TERFS”, “I punch TERFS” and even “KILL THE TERF”. Baseball bats and hammers adorned with the trans flag colours and signs saying “Fuck your pussy power” and “ DIE CIS SCUM” are being proudly waved around by proponents of the doctrine at those same women’s marches and pride parades.
These are predominantly groups of biological males threatening actual violence against women, with weapons.
There was even an exhibition of these paraphernalia at the San Francisco Public Library (you can check that out here).
It is unsettling to me that this has not only become acceptable but quite commonplace under the protective banner of the rainbow flag. What has gone wrong?
Lesbians are being told that - by new definitions - not considering a transwoman (who may still have a penis) as a potential partner is transphobic and exclusionary. Workshops are being run by organisations, such as Planned Parenthood, on “how to overcome the cotton ceiling”, a play on women breaking the glass ceiling, referring to the cotton of a lesbian woman’s underwear...
The “Degenerettes” have supplied me with ample inspiration for my embroidery, and their ‘activism’ seems by no means unusual anymore.
I find it disturbing and disturbed.
Transitioning children
This is another issue I am incredibly alarmed by.
I grew up with many gay and lesbian friends, and they all had one thing in common: adolescence was a bitch.
Now, that is a statement true for most of us, particularly those that behave and present in unconventional ways but for kids that grow up to be homosexual it’s particularly tough in a world that is still quite homophobic. Most only came to terms with and started to feel more comfortable within themselves around their mid to late 20’s. Some struggled for much longer still.
Gender Identity Ideology, suggests that kids who say they are the other gender or express themselves in stereotypical ways normally ascribed to the opposite sex are probably trans. There is no acknowledgement that adolescence is an awkward and very confusing time for all, and to question who you are and where you fit in society is part and parcel of it.
But the speed with which we as a society have embraced the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative really scares me.
I believe it is the responsibility of adults to support children through the challenges of puberty, with love, understanding, acceptance and an approach of watchful waiting.
Instead some adults are now being pressured to unquestioningly accept the idea that a gender questioning child may have been ‘born in the wrong body’. Other parents are actively facilitating the wishes of a minor, who has no way of understanding the long term implications of things like puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgery.
A child who isn’t yet fully sexually developed, may very well wonder about who they are. Particularly if presented with ideas that conflict with common knoweledge, such as: it is actually possible to change sex through medical and surgical intervention, and; there is actually no need to change sex because you are the gender, and by extension, the sex that you feel you are. Sex is but an illusion and all that matters is your identity.
According to peer reviewed studies, in 80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC (gender dysphoria in childhood) the GD recedes with puberty. Rather, many of these adolescents will later identify as non-heterosexual.
There will be those for whom GD persists after puberty and it is paramount to help these individuals to gain easier access to psychological assistance.
But to downplay the long term effects of those medications and surgeries on young children, as many trans activists and proponents of the doctrine are, doesn’t seem kind to me at all. Physical changes during childhood can be irreversible as it is a crucial phase of development, especially in regard of the development of sex characteristics during adolescence.
Nowadays, many kids, particularly those that feel they don’t fit in with larger society, find refuge in online forums like Tumblr, reddit and other such online communities.
The social incentive for some to adopt new identities seems understandably enticing, but can also add to the feelings of discontent as well as dysphoria, according to many accounts of young people who had been part of these online groups and eventually fell out of them.
Benjamin A Boyce has a youtube channel that is a mix of investigative journalism, cultural criticism, and interviews. He has an ongoing series of interviews in which he speaks to transpeople (young and old), de-transitioners, psychologists and sexologists about many of the above mentioned concerns. Those interviews are very respectful, inquisitive and enlightening, and I absolutely recommend them to anybody who is interested. Here is the link.
Furthermore, a fantastic summary of current evidence in the treatment of gender dysphoric children and young people can be found here .
Misplaced compassion
I can see how the origins of this postmodern line of thinking arose from compassion towards people suffering from gender dysphoria who are struggling to come to terms with themselves in an environment that imposes traditional social gender roles on us from birth.
Trans and gender non-comforming individuals often face discrimination, stigmatisation and violence, and also have to deal with a myriad of other mental and physical health issues.
I genuinely feel deeply compassionate towards anybody who experiences any kind of internal struggle, and I believe that better access to, in particular, mental healthcare for people suffering from GD is paramount.
However, none of those reasons convince me to embrace the total denial of epistemological, objective scientific facts, which is a base requirement of this doctrine and a dangerous precedent.
For someone suffering severe depression who has suicidal ideation the compassionate and responsible medical response is not to facilitate their suicide. To promote such a response would be outrageous and illegal.
The same is true for other types of dysphoria such as apotemnophilia or body integrity dysphoria; a rare, infrequently studied condition in which there is a mismatch between the mental body image and the physical body (sound familiar?) characterised by an intense desire for amputation of one or more limbs, or to become blind or deaf. This fixation also often starts in early childhood or adolescence.
As a society, we try to help our fellow individuals. If their body causes them distress or they feel that they would be ‘complete’ if they were arm- or legless, we would not do that by cutting off healthy limbs or making them blind but by trying to find ways to alleviate the reasons for the dysphoria.
Similarly, for someone suffering GD who has the ideation that they must transition to resolve their anguish, I struggle to see how the compassionate and responsible response is the facilitation of the surgical removal of their healthy penis, breasts or ovaries and the ingestion of hormones (which will bring with them numerous future health problems). All without the guarantee of curing their dysphoria.
This should illicit equally as much concern as the others and yet we as a society seem to have embraced the ‘born in the wrong body’ tale fully.
Please watch this documentary and/or read this essay about body integrity dysphoria and explain to me if you can what the difference to gender dysphoria is, because I can not see it. Aside from one being fitted with a narrative and normalised in society, while the other remains ethically difficult and controversial.
A little perspective...
For those that don’t know me personally here’s a little introduction, which perhaps will help you understand why I couldn’t help but write this piece and stitch this embroidery.
While I have lived in London now for 15 years, I originally grew up in East Berlin, as it was until the wall came down in ’89 and Germany was reunified. This opened doors to six-year-little-old-me I never could have imagined, simply because I was unaware of the prison-like restrictions this wall and the communist state had inflicted on my life and that of everybody around me until that point.
The pre-school art folder I still possess is filled with red communist flags, peace doves and DDR (German Democratic Republic) flags crafted from paper cutouts, penciled illustrations and paint. Next to them, a childish drawing of three little girls holding hands: one white, one brown, one yellow; because under communism ‘everybody is equal’.
On face value, some aspects of East Germany seemed almost progressive, for women’s emancipation in particular. Retrospectively, it makes sense that neither of my grandmothers (both endured the Second World War and are still alive) nor my mother or aunties, all of whom spent their formative years trapped the east side of the Berlin Wall, would consider themselves a feminist, and yet I very much do.
I am from the weird in-between generation. I can still remember having to be cautious about what we would say and to whom. Even your closest friends, or so we were told, could turn out to be working for the Stasi, the East German State Security Service, which has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed.
Everyone may have been ‘equal’ but we certainly weren’t free to think and do what we wanted.
Certain TV programs from ‘The West’ were off limits, as was anything not in the ‘communist spirit’. If you were found to be guilty of ‘wrong think’, the consequences could be grave, including prison sentences or worse.
(If you know little of East Germany, I highly recommend watching “The Lives of Others” and “Goodbye Lenin”, both incredible films that will give you a good taste of what life was like then.)
The idea of ’wrong think’ is something that has, worryingly, returned to many aspects of the political spectrum and public discourse. And its increasing prevalence scares the shit out of me, frankly.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Another important piece to my story is my father, who I have always been very close to. He is what can only be described as gender non-conforming, as you can see in the pictures below (which he has allowed me to use for the purpose of this essay). I want to talk about him to give context to my words and how close to home this feels to me.
My dad’s un-inhibited expression has always been a source of pride but also worry for me. I am all too aware that we live in a narrow-minded world that often fervently attempts to ostracise the ‘other’. Some individuals feel it’s acceptable to physically or verbally assault people who do not conform to their idea of ‘normal’. It should go without saying: this is wrong.
I abhor it and will speak out against such prejudices on behalf of everybody that wishes to express themselves outside of our social norms.
I have defended my father and every gender-non conforming person’s right to express themselves freely without fear of violence or discrimination, and have stood up against prejudiced individuals’ ideas of how people should dress and express themselves ‘appropriately’, and I continue to do so.
WIth everything said, I am genuinely deeply worried.
I worry that we have increasingly become a society where valid concerns regarding women’s rights, children's safeguarding and freedom of speech, are being classed as hate speech to stop any debate from happening.
I worry because this notion of ‘wrong think’ and wrong speak’ feels eerily reminiscent of my east german childhood, and that’s actually quite terrifying.
I worry because we should be having nuanced and respectful discussions about how to progress and make life more equal and fair for everybody: how to create more single sex as well as mixed sex facilities and shelters; how to create new trans shortlists in addition to women’s shortlists in political parties, scholarships and the like; how to create a level playing field in sports allowing individuals of all abilities and backgrounds to compete.
How can we support gender questioning children, without neglecting our safeguarding duties and condemning them to an often irreversible medical pathway for life?
Instead, this ideology, which is predominantly rooted in Queer theory and wishful thinking, surrounded by a potent dose of misogyny, homophobia and often also ageism, leaves no room for any debate at all.
Women and transpeople are both marginalised groups within society, and we need to find solutions for both of those groups, without overriding existing rights of women.
I worry because I fear that in the current political climate, and with the rise of populism internationally, women and transpeople will both lose out big time if we continue on this path.
Which begs the question: who really benefits from an imploding liberal and feminist movement?
It isn’t us.
On June 23rd, Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts put out a carefully worded five-paragraph media statement regarding German-born textile artist Jess de Wahls. “We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now,” read the RA communiqué. “We had no right to judge her views … This betrayed our most important core value—the protection of free speech.”
The controverted speech in question was contained in a 2019 blog post, in which de Wahls wrote that “a woman is an adult human female (not an identity or feeling),” and that trans women are “biological males [who] choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women.” These are statements that almost every person knows to be true, but which have become unfashionable to say out loud in highly progressive subcultures. And so, when a handful of people raised a fuss about de Wahls’ work being sold in the RA gift shop, Academy officials not only purged de Wahl from their inventory earlier this month, but peacocked their reasons for doing so.
“Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA Shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention,” read the June 17th post on RA’s Instagram feed. “We were unaware of [de Wahls’s] stated views, and their work will not be stocked in the future. We appreciate you holding us to account on this issue, and we would like to reiterate that we stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”
In backing down from its attempted cancelation of de Wahls, the RA now claims that “[a] plurality of voices, tolerance, and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect.” Whether or not this Road-to-Damascus conversion is sincere, these high-flown words glide over the fact that de Wahls’s views were never remotely “transphobic” to begin with, no matter what standard of “tolerance” one might choose to apply. Moreover, RA’s expressed conceit that punishing the artist had been a good-faith gesture intended to demonstrate solidarity with the “LGBTQ+ community” was always farcical: Some of the most prominent critics of progressive gender orthodoxy are themselves gay, lesbian, or trans.
De Wahls was fortunate: Her case attracted widespread sympathy, and the RA was attacked sharply on social media. (Even Britain’s ruling political party appeared to be on the artist’s side.) But the very fact that she had to defend her reputation in this way shows how deeply embedded gender dogma has become in the world of arts and letters. This includes journalism, too: Even after the Academy apologized to de Wahls, news reports described the artist as being marked by “accusations of transphobia,” without plainly noting that these accusations are baseless. And thanks to Google, these smears will follow de Wahls throughout her career.
In recent months, the issue of where to draw the line on trans rights has been front-page news thanks to the case of Laurel Hubbard, a formerly washed up 1990s-era junior-level New Zealand male weightlifter who transitioned to a female identity in 2012, and now is set to compete in this year’s Olympics—at age 43. The prospect of biological males making a mockery of female sports in this way has spurred many formerly cowed public figures to point out the abundantly obvious physical differences between biological women and biological men. And in some recent cases, as with scholar Grace Lavery at University of California, Berkeley, trans activists’ sweeping claims that we can alter our biological sex (or that the whole concept of biological sex is a mere myth) are now being properly ridiculed. Popular writers and podcasters such as Debra Soh, Abigail Shrier, Kathleen Stock, Graham Linehan, Helen Joyce, and Meghan Murphy have by now spent years raising the alarm against gender extremism, and there is some evidence their efforts are bearing fruit. A milestone of sorts was observed last month when even the New York Times, an early and regular signal booster of gender-bending maximalism, called out the ACLU (however gingerly) for its over-the-top trans jingoism. All secular movements built on pseudoscience persist on borrowed time, and this one is proving no exception.
But even amid the apparent decay of “gender supremacism” (to borrow a phrase from Quillette contributor Allan Stratton), its mantras remain embedded as holy writ in many professional subcultures—largely because gender activists have successfully entrenched themselves amid the various oversight bodies, trade associations, and unions that serve as gatekeepers in these fields. In many professions, these authorities possess the power to end a person’s career.
In the UK, for instance, a trans schoolteacher named Debbie Hayton was threatened with expulsion from the Trades Union Congress for acknowledging that trans women (such as Hayton, in fact) are biologically male. In Scotland, a whole slew of politicians and activists have been excommunicated by their own cadres following accusations of gender wrongthink. In British Columbia, a small group of lawyers operating within the bar association’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Committee have rewritten court procedures so that lawyers are now effectively required to act out pronoun recitals as a condition to exercise their duties as litigators.
In the same province, a nurse is being dragged through a lengthy investigation process originally sparked by the fact that she’d publicly supported the erection of a billboard stating, “I Heart JK Rowling.” According to a report prepared by an investigator for the province’s College of Nurses and Midwives, “the Complainant [Alex Turriff] stated that this billboard was created to show support for author JK Rowling after she publicly came out with transphobic views,” and so casts into doubt “how [Hamm] can be trusted to provide safe, non-judgmental care, and wonders how transgender and gender diverse patients can be safe in her care.” This report is 332 pages long, and Hamm’s ordeal continues to this day, with her professional future resting, in part, on the question of whether a person can simultaneously be a competent medical professional and a fan of a woman who wrote popular children’s books. Hamm is represented legally by a group that supports constitutional freedoms, but others in her situation have had trouble finding a lawyer to take their cases: In the UK, as Maya Forstater has noted, some law firms have allegedly been encouraged to turn away non-ideologically compliant clients lest these firms lose their stamp of approval from trans activist groups such as Stonewall UK.
One reason these milieus have succumbed so readily to gender cultism is that activists have successfully weaponized a definition of “transphobia” that now encompasses virtually any acknowledgment of the biological facts concerning human sexual dimorphism. Moreover, their case often is made in apocalyptic terms, with whole legions of trans children allegedly being set on extinguishing themselves if even the slightest ideological deviation is permitted in public discourse. Through such rhetorical methods, even this essay can be regarded as dangerous (and perhaps even deadly) propaganda. One of the few liberal journalists who’s taken pains to map out these tactics, Jesse Singal, has been subject to a campaign of lies and personal attacks that resembles Scientologists’ treatment of “Suppressive Persons.”
Indeed, even tautological descriptions of biological reality now are cast as thought crimes. In 2017, world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told an interviewer: “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.” This perfectly sensible statement was predictably denounced on that basis that, as Vox put it, “these remarks implied that trans women aren’t ‘real women’—a stereotype that transgender people constantly struggle against and find deeply offensive.” And in a searing June 15th essay, Adichie describes the Kafkaesque ordeal she’s endured in the four years since, during which time literary rivals (especially her former protégé, Akwaeke Emezi) have orchestrated an often sociopathic-seeming campaign of defamation—capped by Emezi’s ghoulish tweet expressing “trust that there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate.”
As Adichie suggests, what started as a well-intentioned movement to fight actual transphobia has morphed into a viciously guarded orthodoxy that demands primacy over all other commitments and loyalties, including personal friendship. She catalogs the sadists who’ve come out to attack her as:
People who claim to love literature—the messy stories of our humanity—but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by “educate,” they actually mean “parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.” People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy—sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy. People who wield the words “violence” and “weaponize” like tarnished pitchforks.
Last month, Quillette broadcast a podcast interview with Bernard Lane, a writer and editor at the Australian who has documented the risks associated with rushing gender dysphoric children into aggressive medical treatments. In any other pediatric medical context, this kind of journalistic investigation would be seen as laudatory. But such is the ideological climate surrounding this issue that special rules apparently apply. On May 24th, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented viewers with what purported to be a profile of Michelle Telfer, head of the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne’s Gender Clinic, but whose main purpose seems to have been the denunciation of the Australian’s coverage of gender transition.
Telfer complains that the newspaper is “one-sided” and that it has quoted experts of whom Telfer disapproves. At one point in the feature, a public-health official attacks the Australian for having “continued to publish articles” that challenge the preferred narrative—thus echoing Telfer’s own public complaints about her work being criticized. The public broadcaster’s overall message is that the journalistic community should get on board with the received wisdom, and stop creating trouble for those seeking to reflexively “affirm” any child who claims to be born in the wrong body.
As Keira Bell’s stunning legal victory in the UK shows, the journalistic establishment has much to answer for when it comes to either ignoring, or even actively suppressing, well-founded concerns in this area. In Britain, Ms. Bell’s case and related developments have set in motion a much-needed process of soul-searching among policy-makers (with the UK government now severing ties with Stonewall UK’s infamously cynical diversity-training program). But this process is less advanced in other English-speaking countries such as Canada. In the United States, meanwhile, the policy landscape is increasingly polarized between progressives who seek total censorship of “gender-critical” viewpoints, and red-state social conservatives enacting overly broad laws that, in some cases, would go too far by banning transition therapies completely.
As for Lane and the Australian, they are now the subject of a 42-page complaint to the country’s Press Council, a fact implicitly celebrated by ABC’s producers, who film Telfer’s partner describing how “since putting in the complaint to the press council, she’s just felt in control now … less of a victim.” While the text of the complaint is not in the public domain, one can read Telfer’s 2020 submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications in regard to media diversity, in which she lists her complaints about the Australian at considerable length. In that submission, Telfer claims that rapid onset gender dysphoria, as described by Brown University scholar Lisa Littman in 2018, does not exist; blithely dismisses concerns over the growing ranks of detransitioners such as Bell; and downplays concerns about the experimental nature of puberty-blocking drugs—despite the fact these concerns had become the subject of scandal in the UK even by the time of Telfer’s 2020 submission.
The Australian has been one of the few media outlets that has dared challenge the approved narrative on gender. And Lane, in particular, often has been a lonely voice of reason. But theirs is an uphill battle that will likely continue for years, as gender ideologues draw from the tall stack of institutional cards they’ve accumulated in recent years. While each of the controversies discussed herein may seem small and inconsequential—the contents of a museum gift store, a deleted Twitter account, a canceled university event, a muzzled author—the larger issue at play is not. The “final, most essential command” of any coercive movement is, as George Orwell once put it, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Once you sweep aside all the glitter showers, animated unicorns, and rainbow emojis, that is ultimately what gender supremacism is truly about.
Featured image: Art by Jess de Wahls
“The Fight for the Soul of Seattle” examines the role of Seattle’s City Council in allowing the situation to reach what many experts consider epidemic levels under the guise of a compassionate approach to people who suffer from substance addiction and who commit crimes to feed their habit.
It documents the heartbreaking condition of people on the streets, and the crushing decisions Seattle entrepreneurs are forced to contemplate as their life savings and dreams are destroyed by theft, vandalism and a dwindling customer base. This documentary also explores potential bold solutions to treat those living on the streets and pair them with agencies and assistance that can provide a clear path away from the endless circle of addiction and crime.
00:03:20 - Seattle eBike store, Brian Nordwell
00:07:20 - Mark Sidran, Former Seattle City Attorney
00:12:16 - Scott Lindsey, Former Public Safety for Mayor Ed Murray
00:14:35 - Ginny Burton
00:17:30 - Tom Wolf
00:20:50 - Seattle PD difficult job
00:29:00 - CHOP, Lorenzo Anderson
00:32:00 - East precinct taken back
00:33:21 - Court house protection
00:37:00 - Former Judge Ed Mckenna
00:49:07 - Seattle City Council, defund police
00:52:20 - Business fighting for survival
00:58:00 - Mental health issues, support
01:06:28 - Drug and homeless epidemic reform
01:13:30 - Travis Berge, repeat offenders
01:20:00 - Kevan Carter Jr.'s mental illness
01:26:40 - What can be done? What's the plan?
Storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons)
By Diana Johnstone
**in Paris**Special to Consortium News
What happened in the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not surprising. It could have been avoided. It could have been prevented if the Democratic Establishment which held onto keys of power throughout Trump’s mandate had truly wanted a smooth presidential transition. For months prior to the election, the elite Transition Integrity Project was spreading the alarm, loudly echoed by liberal media, that Trump would lose and refuse to acknowledge his loss.
There was a simple, obvious way to avoid such a drama. In an article for Consortium News last August, I suggested how this could be done.
“It seems to me that if the Democratic establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him. […]
As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. […] In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. […]
For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise? Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.
It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.”
So indeed what we got was something more exciting. Not exactly regime change, because we are seeing instead a powerful reaffirmation of the regime that was really still there during Trump’s largely deformed four-year term. The haste with which his aides and allies desert him in his last hour makes this clear. He was always a president without a team, operating on hunches, rhetoric and advice from his son-in-law and a few insiders who were really outsiders.
But what we are getting is indeed exciting: an alleged “insurrection” supposedly incited by Trump to “steal the election” (which it had absolutely no way of doing). The scenes of disorder have been instantly exploited to plunge him and his followers into an abyss of ignominy, if not criminal proceedings and imprisonment.
More Like Otpor
Otpor graffiti in Belgrade, 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)
What happened on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. Anyone wanting to know what an insurrection is should look up the U.S.-sponsored armed uprising that overthrew duly elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The Capitol disturbance was more like what happened when U.S.-trained “Otpor” militants broke into the Serbian parliament in the midst of that country’s 2000 presidential election and set fire to ballot boxes.
Or check out a particularly pertinent insurrection when truly violent demonstrators took over the Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 and overthrew the government, an event hailed by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as a great victory for democracy. Then there was the Hillary-endorsed coup in Honduras, the almost successful attempt to overthrow democracy in Bolivia, the U.S.-backed Guaido farce in Venezuela, etc., etc., etc.
No, an insurrection is not when a large crowd of people who feel their candidate has been cheated vent their indignation by managing to break into “their” parliament with no purpose in mind. Most of the intruders milled about taking selfies with no clear idea what to do next. By world standards, the “violence” on Jan. 6 was very mild indeed, the only gun violence being the fatal shooting of an unarmed Trump enthusiast, Ashli Babbitt, who could easily have been pushed back from her adventurous attempt to climb over a barricade.
The intrusion was so far from carrying out a pro-Trump plan that it had the opposite effect. The immediate political result of the eruption of the undisciplined crowd was to prevent Republican Senators who were so inclined from presenting their arguments against the legitimacy of the November vote. If anything, the action worked in the favor of President-elect Biden.
One might think that in his moment of victory, a true statesman would demonstrate the qualities it takes to lead a nation by offering to bring all people together as fellow Americans. He did quite the opposite.
The very next day after the Capitol happening, in his small fiscal haven home state of Delaware, Biden raged against his opponents as a terrorist mob, no less.
“They weren’t protestors,” he proclaimed. “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
Trump, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack.” Trump had poisoned the political environment by using “language that autocrats and dictators use all over the world to hold on to power.”
Biden’s own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power. Trump was trying to “deny the will of the American people,” he said, much as Trump said of him. The whole problem was that “the will of the American people” was far from unanimous.
The Authoritarian Center
So even before his inauguration, President-elect Biden has given us a bitter taste of days ahead. There is to be no sacred unity, but deepened division between The Good (woke liberals), the Bad (Russians and other enemies of Our Democracy) and the Ugly Americans, to be labeled Domestic Terrorists, White Supremacists and fascists.
The authoritarian center, ranging from opportunistic Republicans to The Squad, can rally around the necessary purge of Domestic Terrorists, silencing their communications and getting them properly fired from their jobs.
The Establishment has long been determined to crush Trump. But there is talk of “purging” all his followers as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President, calling for measures to combat the internal enemy such as accompany major wars.
The oligarchic nature of the American War Party is revealed by the haste with which privately owned social media enterprises silence dissent – even the still acting President of the United States. Indeed, who really rules the United States? Is the president only an agent of economic powers whose role is to serve their interests? And the trouble with Trump is that he had not been picked for the job.
Trump managed to appeal to millions of discontented Americans without offering any coherent practical program to replace the War Party with policies capable of transforming the nation into a haven of peace and prosperity. His confusion mirrored the ideological confusion of a population scandalously undereducated in history and political ideas. The illusion that Trump was the leader dissident Americans needed cost Ashli Babbit her life and led thousands of Trump voters into what amounts to a trap. Trump himself was led into the trap.
A completely different approach to politics is needed to restore democracy to America. All appeals to identities and ideologies can only deepen the confusion and divisions, because they prevent people from understanding each other.
The Biden administration appears intent on strengthening such confusion and divisions precisely by recourse to identities and ideologies. I firmly believe that only a scrupulously rational, open-minded, factual and pragmatic approach to clearly defined practical problems could bring peace to the United States, a peace that could favor peace in the world.
From outside the melee, it is easy to define the serious issues that should dominate political debate in the United States. But instead of that, we hear a torrential exchange of insults. The establishment elite cannot stoop to exchange viewpoints with populists denounced as deplorable, racist, misogynist, white supremacist, fascist and now even “terrorist.”
The populists’ unfocused denunciation of the elite describes Wall Street Democrats as “socialists” and veers off into accusations of genocidal vaccination campaigns, occult pedophile rites and Satanism. Instead of anything resembling a clear political division, America is increasingly split by blind, burning mutual hatred.
What American political life needs is not more censorship, but the self-censorship of reason. That is very far away.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human cultures.
Predictions for the year ahead must be so ephemeral that they become pointless. The ‘unknown unknowns’ are too many; the situation, too dynamic. Yet, it is possible to take some key variables, which are all too easily taken for granted, and to look them more directly ‘in the eye’. Why do that, if ‘to look’ is uncomfortable? The answer, the ancients, told us is, that without that piercing ‘look’ of consciousness, our unspoken anxieties evolve through our unconscious, into psychosis – or physical sickness. Our bubble boundaries requires firstly rupture.
Let us then start with the U.S. at this point of fundamental inflection: Biden’s Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan speaking in recent days, exuded confidence that Biden’s chumminess with lawmakers ‘across the aisle’ in the Congress will help push through his China policies: “He (Biden) knows his mind on China and he is going to carry forward a strategy that is not based on politics, not based on being pushed around by domestic constituencies (sic – interesting comment). Sullivan described it as a “clear-eyed strategy, a strategy that recognises that China is a serious strategic competitor to the U.S. – that acts in ways that are at odds with our interests in many ways including trade.” Yet, at the same time, “it is also a strategy that recognises that we will work with China, when it is in our interests to do so”.
What is there to complain about in such ‘a normal, rational statement’? Nothing per se – except that it presumes a return to the old bi-partisan politics, in which Red and Blue lawmakers attend the same Washington cocktails, and assumes a shared desire to engage together in the ‘business’ of Washington.
Patricia Murphy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who has been covering the senatorial runoff in Georgia, noted that: “Republicans just don’t trust the election … Not one Republican voter, Murphy has spoken to since Election Day, believes that President-elect Biden won. “Not one, not a person”, she said. “And many of them don’t even think he’ll be inaugurated on January 20”.
Murphy’s statement speaks forcefully to two American realities: One is rooted in a deep distrust of the élites, and of a soiled status quo; the ‘other’ reality views Murphy’s interlocutors as not only in denial, but views them with contempt.
We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.
And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour. This has meant for the architects of the Trump campaign that his campaign – and politics more generally – must be about mobilisation – rather than persuasion. Politics, in other words is now Post-persuasion; post-‘factual’.
The ‘insurrection’ at the Capitol Building – for those who may have witnessed revolutionary mobs elsewhere – was comparatively inoffensive (one unarmed, former U.S. Air Force vet protestor, was shot dead by the police through a closed door). Clearly, this assault on the Hill was never intended as a real ‘coup’; it was rather Trump manoeuvring to keep his base energised and mobilised – and with him firmly in control of the Party. Nonetheless, it has been PR disaster, leaving many of his supporters bewildered. If the aim were to expose details of fraud as part of the confirmation hearing, it failed.
If it were a coup at all, it was one aimed by Trump at the GOP ‘old guard’, such as Romney, (who was taunted as a traitor, by fellow passengers during his flight to Washington). It is the country-club GOP élite who are struggling to ‘take-back’ the Party from the Trumpistas. Will they succeed, in the light of what has happened? The Deep State has closed ranks irrevocably against Trump. Are his nine (cats’) lives now expended?
Though Trump be at the forefront of what happened on 6 January, it is not just about him (as the MSM insist). Rather, the U.S. today is skirmishing its way towards an existential fight: This is a battle over the nature and direction of change itself; Over where society and its constitutional order are going; and how the legitimacy of republican rule, in its essence, is to be defined. “Simply, America’s longstanding political equipoise (from c. 1876) has completely broken down. Continuity and change, for better or worse, is now locked in a classic death match. How will it be resolved? How will it end?”.
Not trusting in the election, in U.S. democracy, therefore flags a profound change in politics taking hold in America and in Europe. The Georgia loss, perhaps, is less crucial now: Elements of the GOP are preparing for radical opposition (to save the Republic, which they see as courting complete loss). The objecting members of Congress knew that they could never succeed in obtaining supporting majorities in both houses of congress for their objections. Their aim rather, seemed to be to establish a baseline (evidence of fraud) for future activist opposition to the results of the 2020 election. Along this baseline they will insist that Biden/Harris are not legitimately elected, and are usurpers against whom any means of resistance is justified. They hoped to inherit Trump’s base, and to ‘ride its wave’. Is there a vacancy now? That is a question for 2021.
The next question for 2021 then, concerns that old adage: ‘Beware not to win too much’. It can be a mistake to corner your adversaries to having nothing to lose. The Blue state has ousted Trump; and Blue has taken everything across ‘the board’, and are ready to implement the ‘Re-set’ – the ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social ‘woke’ revolution, as well as a political transformation. The full outcome would likely reconstitute the constitutional order, in ways unrecognizable to most Americans today.
But will Red America succumb from exhaustion, or lack of leadership; or, on the other hand, might it find the energy to revitalise ‘their’ Republic? We shall see – a big question whose ramifications might make the EU élites particularly nervous. Of course Blue now possesses force majeure. But there is another old adage: ‘No passionate, partisan assessment has any value, save to inflame’ – and Big Tech and the MSM’s censorship and accompanying humiliation of Trump may turn him a martyr, and make the spirit of defiance all the stronger.
Despite the GOP Old Guard attempted ‘counter-revolution’ (talking 25th Amendment action), the divisions between the two Americas are now so great that it can only mean ultimately a de-coupling of the ‘across the aisle’ chumminess (even if this has to be postponed until the 2022 congressional election round). Is Jake Sullivan’s optimism that Biden’s chums across the aisle will allow him to push through his China policies unscathed – especially as Biden is viewed as deeply blemished in respect to China? Might 2021 rather underline the new era of civil conflict, rather than a return to old civilities – and hence to new, ‘take no prisoners’ politics?
The priority issues for all western leaders surely will be Covid; the concomitant push-back from small and medium sized businessmen against lockdown, and dealing with the noxious ‘them-and-us’ effects of a ‘free money’ economic paradigm. Foreign policy – other than China and Russia (on which there exists the one, and almost only, U.S. bi-partisan consensus) – may garner lesser attention.
And here are the inter-related shibboleths that may require a little more critical re-thinking for 2021: America and the EU – understandably – desperately want their economies to snap-back into recovery: “Biden’s blue wave almost guarantees it”, the Telegraph’s economics editor Evans Pritchard exalts – “as Fiscal stimulus meets monetary jet fuel already tanked in the system – just as America comes out of the pandemic”.
It may seem a tad curmudgeonly even to question such panglossian hopes. The vaccines have been sold as ‘the hope’ for normal; but the notion that the vaccines are about to propel the U.S. tout suite into jet-fuelled nirvana, seems premature. The WHO says that it is yet to be determined whether the vaccines actually stop infection (as opposed to merely mitigating its more severe symptoms).
It is yet to be discovered whether the vaccines are effective, at all, against the new strains of the Covid virus (such as the UK and South African mutations); and it is uncertain how many Americans will even accept to be vaccinated. It seems rather, to boil-down to a race between accelerating infections, and dawdling vaccine manufacture and distribution – with a final outcome to this race still uncertain. That outcome, whatever it is, will have political consequences – for the EU in particular in the year ahead.
There is too, a fragile and peripatetic frontier (in both America and Europe), between the notions that Covid lockdowns are a deliberate élite ploy to concentrate the economy in the hands of a few oligarchs – and, on the other hand, a conviction that the infection is a grave risk, requiring a high degree of public discipline. Where this ‘frontier’ flows; on which side of the median it comes to rest during this year; as well as the success (or lack of it) in rolling out effective and safe vaccines, will constitute a key political event – maybe even an existential one for some governments and institutions.
It is hard to see growth simply springing forth out of further massive increases in government debt – Biden’s ‘jet-fuel’. Since 2008, debt has suffocated growth, seeded a crop of zombie companies, and stimulated mainly a runaway asset appreciation. And it is hard to see such growth coming from an economy that is centralising around huge monopolistic behemoths, who stifle innovation, whilst small businesses are massacred. The question is about real growth, or are we looking at just another just another puff of liquidity pointed towards ‘make-believe’ growth? Polls (Forbes) suggest that 48% of American small businesses, risk closing for good.
Of course centralisation of economic activity around big business represents the central plank to the Great tech Re-set. The latter is promoted as an unstoppable, supply-side ‘miracle’ which will transform productivity, and growth. Yet, this thesis seems is not supported by history: “For a quarter of a century, post WW2”, the Chicago Booth Review notes, the value of production of every worker hour rose 2.7 percent per year. Then there was a slowdown for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994, when productivity growth fell to 1.5 percent per year. This was a period that included the rise of the personal computer and the integration of new technologies in a number of industries – and, as is the case today, people wonder why it was that productivity growth slowed down”. Robert Solow famously said, “I see computers everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”
“Eventually, we did see the computers in the productivity statistics. Around the mid-1990s, productivity accelerated again, up to about 3 percent per year. It stayed there for a decade, before slowing again. It hasn’t yet picked up. So the 1.2 percent average annual productivity growth we’ve been experiencing since the mid-2000s is less than half of what it was in the decade prior, and is slower even than the 20-year slowdown from 1974 to 1994.
“Despite what seem like incredibly rapid changes in technology, we don’t see technologically-driven growth in the data – and in fact we see the opposite pattern. Since economic growth requires productivity growth: If we don’t figure out why this is happening, and how to fix it, we won’t get sustained increases in GDP per capita”.
Blue has swept the board. Yet, the year is new-born: Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human relations and cultures. The danger of the liberal-style Re-set for Francis Fukuyama, would be that it cannot assuage the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos – the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown. Fukuyama observes that “Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice”. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on to the battlefield of Troy.
“Those who remain dissatisfied, will always have the potential to restart history”, Fukuyama observes.
The Usual hype
For "The West Australian", for his last days, Donald Trump, like Adolf Hitler, wishes for "the twilight of the gods".
In every presidential election in the United States, we are told that the incumbent was a monster, that we are sorry for the crimes he committed, but that a new day is dawning for humanity with the rise of a new leader. The only exception is the election of Donald Trump in 2016. At that time and even before he was sworn in, we were told that this billionaire was elected following a regrettable mistake, that he was misogynistic, homophobic, racist, that he did not embody the "country of freedom", but the supremacism of the "little whites" and the interests of the rich. For four years, we were constantly being convinced that this diagnosis was right. He was called a liar and his ideas and achievements were ignored.
This time, the insurrection on Capitol Hill allowed the dominant news agencies to add a layer to it. The outgoing president, Donald Trump, is unanimously accused of destroying democracy, which the incoming president, Joe Biden, will of course restore. Are those who remember the elections of George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama ready to be fooled again?
For "Milliyet" (Turkey), the virtuous America has gone mad.
Yes, because the shock caused by the capture of the Capitol is such that one is willing to believe anything. If the United States is inexorably heading towards civil war [1], what will become of us Westerners?
This is why we did not want to see the crisis that is beginning to unfold. Only a few Greek newspapers had recently explained the reasons for the anger, which we have been dealing with for five years already (i.e. before Trump’s election).
This is also why we don’t want to look it in the face and we are satisfied with the blind comments that this shameful episode will not have a tomorrow. But who can believe it? It is true that things will calm down for a while and the repressive machine will crush the January 6 demonstrators, but it will only be a postponement and the civil war will not be long in coming.
Non-Westerners have already understood that the United States has such internal problems that it will no longer be able to set itself up as a model for the world, let alone give lessons in democracy to those it wants to subjugate.
Undemocratic elections
According to "La Razon" (Spain), the insurgency in the United States was the Trumpeters taking Capitol Hill.
In the 2000 presidential election, the bewildered world watched as the Supreme Court chose to ignore the recount of the Florida ballots. In accordance with the Constitution, it declared that it had no business interfering with a state’s ballot and was constrained only by Governor Jeb Bush’s decision that his brother George W. Bush had been elected by his constituents. Twenty years later, the world is watching the dismissal of 60 appeals filed by Donald Trump alleging massive fraud in many states.
As I wrote earlier, from a US legal perspective, Al Gore and then Donald Trump lost. But from a democratic point of view, they probably won. To tell the truth, it is impossible to know exactly, but given the results of the other elections that were held at the same time, there is little doubt about that. The only thing that can be said is that there is nothing democratic about this election: the counting of the votes is done by the governors, who in many federal states choose the civil servants or private companies that will do the counting. On the contrary, if the system were democratic, the counting would be done by citizens in public. Everyone could see ballot boxes being taken from the polling stations to a counting centre where officials opened them and then closed the curtains to prevent citizens from finding out more. No one can question the sincerity of these officials, but no one can guarantee it either. A democratic election can only exist in transparency. Therefore, this election is legal under US law, but simply not democratic.
Turnarounds
According to the "Corriere della Sera" (Italy), Trump’s fury is the assault on the Capitol.
To understand the events, we must observe two reversals of the situation that preceded the attack on the Capitol.
In mid-December 2020, President Trump organised a meeting at the Oval Office with the participation of General Michael Flynn. Flynn outlined his idea of martial law for transparent elections [2]. Most of the councillors present were opposed, despite the change of leadership in the Pentagon. Two weeks later, on 4 January 2021, the 10 former defence secretaries still alive signed a brief op-ed in the Washington Post [3]. They assured that all those who tried to introduce martial law would have to answer to the Justice Department. The unanimity of the former Secretaries of Defense attests that martial law was feasible and real. According to the Post [4], which reconstructed the meeting on the basis of the confidences of the former defence secretaries (who did not attend but were informed), President Trump never contemplated staying in power through the use of violence. On the contrary, he filed complaints and supported various legal actions to have the election annulled. He was preparing to campaign to return to the White House in 2025 [5].
For the Hindustan Times (India), the states of the Americas are no longer united, but on fire.
Vice-President Mike Pence, who was under heavy pressure from the Jacksonians, made his position known on January 6, the day the two congressional assemblies met in joint session [6]. He noted that his role as presiding officer was purely ceremonial and that it was not his job to decide the dispute, even though a certain reading of the Constitution theoretically gives him the right to do so. He therefore deferred to the parliamentarians. To do otherwise would have opened the smouldering civil war. At times like these, everyone knows what he or she can lose, and few people, particularly among the notables, are willing to take such a risk. As soon as this position became known, several important members of the Trump team resigned. The Jacksonians experienced these reversals as cowardice and betrayal of their ideals and their homeland.
A few hours later, Donald Trump held a meeting, not far from Congress, to denounce once again a "stolen election" and announce his return for the 2024 campaign. He never called on his supporters to take Capitol Hill, although some may have understood it that way.
Taking the Capitol
According to "Dawn" (Greece), "Trumpism is here and it threatens us”.
Some groups that were marginalized during the meeting tried to enter the Capitol. According to the videos, the Capitol police let them in without any real resistance. The demonstrators initially behaved deferentially in this place, which is sacred to them. However, they had been infiltrated by a group of Antifas. Without knowing why or how, things suddenly got out of hand. The hemicycle was invaded and parliamentarians’ offices were ransacked.
Anyone who has lived through a civil war knows that this is the worst thing that can happen. Like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who lived through the first English civil war, they all believe that it is better to suffer a tyrannical state than to be deprived of a state (The Leviathan [7]). Taking the Capitol and eventually overthrowing the US "order" is an act with terrible consequences. It has not gone that far. The police who had allowed the demonstrators to enter the building suddenly and successfully pushed them back.
President Donald Trump himself called for calm, but without his wife. According to the US national religion, God’s blessing - and thus peace and prosperity - must descend through the president and first lady [8] on the "chosen people". By choosing to speak on his own, Donald Trump has challenged the national religion.
Reactions in the US
According to the "Daily Mirror" (UK), now in the United States, it is now government by the mob.
Democratic congressmen, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, immediately accused President Trump of having launched his troops on an assault on Congress. They proposed to impeach President Trump, even though he had only 13 days left in his term, through the 25th Amendment, paragraph 4 of the Constitution. This move, which they had previously discussed, would remove his right to stand for re-election.
However, the text invoked should not apply in this case: it concerns a disability attributable to the health of the President. The debates at the time of its adoption concerned the heart attack which prevented President Woodrow Wilson from fulfilling his duties at the end of his term of office (2 October 1919 to 4 March 1921) and the stroke - less serious - of President Dwight Eisenhower (24 September 1955 to 20 January 1961) which temporarily deprived him of some of his faculties and led him to share his powers with his vice-president Richard Nixon.
The ruling class felt the wind of the cannonball blowing. Whether the capture of Capitol Hill was a failure of its police force, as they try to persuade us, or whether it was organized under a false flag by Donald Trump’s enemies, those who conceived it have the capacity to overthrow institutions and sack their entire staff.
Reactions abroad
For the "Boston Herald" (USA), this is chaos.
After a century of US domination, the rest of the world still doesn’t know what they are. It doesn’t know that the Constitution was written to establish a regime inspired by the British monarchy and that it was rebalanced by 10 amendments that guarantee people’s rights. The country that Alexis de Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America [9] is the country of this compromise, a country of freedom, but this balance was upset during the Obama years. Blinded, the rest of the world did not see that the United States has reverted to what it was in the first four years of its foundation: an oligarchic system, this time in the service of a class of international billionaires. It deliberately ignored the plight of the former middle classes, the grouping of the population by cultural affinity and the preparation of two-thirds of the population for civil war.
The Chinese media cannot help but notice the double standard when comparing photos of the Hong Kong assembly being taken by a high-voltage crowd with those from Washington. While the Russian media, busy with the Orthodox Christmas party, smiled disillusioned at their historic rival on land.
For their part, the Western media have embraced without reservation the neo-Puritan "cancel culture" that destroys all republican symbols and replaces them with others glorifying minorities, not for what they do, but because they are minorities. In doing so, they have identified a little more with the ideology that oppresses "America" [10]. As submissive vassals, they presented the US election as if their readers were going to participate and Joe Biden as their new master.
The "Chicago Tribune" (USA) does not denounce sedition, but sees insurrection.
Reacting to the events on Capitol Hill, European leaders are taking their dreams for granted: German President and former head of the secret service, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said that armed pro-Trump protesters had taken Capitol Hill; while the French President and former secretary to a well-known philosopher, Emmanuel Macron, denounced an attack on the fundamental principle of democracy "One man, one vote".
No. With few exceptions, the Capitol demonstrators were unarmed.
No. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for equality among citizens of any state.
Yes. It is the US ruling class that despises democracy and the Jacksonians who defend it.
"God help us! "proclaims the Philadephia Daily News (USA). "The non-civil war has come to this point: rioters have taken the Capitol".
Already the very great fortunes that stand behind Joe Biden have seized power. They have put an end to freedom of expression. They "preventively" closed the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch accounts of the White House, President Trump and his supporters in order to "prevent them from calling for further violence" (sic). In doing so, they have arrogated to themselves the powers of Justice and have escaped the Trump decree of 28 June 2020 enjoining them to choose between the status of neutral carrier of information or that of committed producer of information [11].
We bounced along a pitted dirt road on an Indigenous reserve in Northern Ontario. As I leaned on my horn to convince a bored looking, semi-feral stray dog to move out of our path, I chatted with my passenger. She was a young Indigenous woman who worked at our police detachment as an administration assistant. It was midnight, and I was driving her home at the end of her shift because dangers—both canine and human—rendered it unsafe for our civilian staff members to walk home alone after dark. This woman, who I’ll call Grace, was 23 years old. She had recently returned to the reserve after spending a year in southern Ontario attending university. Raised in a home with two alcoholic parents, by the age of 14 she was pregnant. Another child with another father would follow before her 18th birthday. Neither of these men remained in her life.
Despite these challenges, Grace was a voracious reader who loved school. With the help of a supportive teacher and various government programs, she was able to complete school and get accepted to university. An arrangement was made whereby she would attend university down south while her parents, by now recovering alcoholics, looked after her children. Unfortunately, this potential success story would end in failure. Within a year, Grace’s parents had returned to drinking and she was forced to choose between withdrawing from school and returning to care for her children or losing them to foster care. She chose the former and the intergenerational cycle of defeat continued.
Activists invariably claim “racism” or a “lack of funding” are behind stories like these. But these are simplistic characterizations of complex problems. No fair-minded person wants to see a person like Grace fail. Indeed, recent years have seen a groundswell of public support demanding better outcomes for people like her. And Grace’s situation can hardly be attributed to a “lack of funding.” The financial and social supports were in place to help her achieve her goals. What undermined her were deep-rooted social pathologies that simply cannot be solved through corporate diversity programs, increased government funding, or vituperative Twitter campaigns that seek to defenestrate those who fail to stay current with the malleable tenets of the zeitgeist.
As a now senior Canadian police officer in my third decade of service, I have reflected on this experience quite a bit recently. Current orthodoxy would ascribe Grace’s situation to “systemic” racism. As I watch media, activists, academics, and opportunistic politicians push each other aside to denounce the men and women who patrol our communities as pawns of a systemically racist institution, I have been struck by the passionate intensity of their accusations. As I write this, the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Brenda Lucki, is fighting for her professional survival after admitting publicly that she “struggled” with the definition of systemic racism. For me and many other officers these attacks are bewildering because Commissioner Lucki echoes sentiments many of us hold. Some will argue that this is because we suffer from blind spots due to our privilege. Perhaps. But to that I would respond that our experience as police officers entitles us to a unique perspective on these issues not readily apparent to anyone who has never worn the uniform.
As calls to “defund police” continue, academics, activists, politicians, and other public figures are re-evaluating the role law enforcement plays in liberal democratic societies. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing. Societies are fluid, and society’s institutions must be fluid too. For years, a debate has raged within police and criminological circles about what exactly police should be doing. Mental health provides one example. Since the 1970s, virtually every jurisdiction in the Western world began the process of deinstitutionalization, which saw those suffering from psychiatric disorders treated within the community rather than warehoused in asylums. While this was a humane evolution, it also resulted in police officers becoming the default option when a person with a psychiatric disorder suffers emotional distress. Recent events have shown that this model needs re-evaluation. A greater emphasis on community-based mental health supports would be welcomed by mental health professionals, patient advocates, and police alike.
Another area in which activists and police leaders would no doubt find common ground relates to police accountability. Since the 1960s, the job protections afforded to police officers have grown exponentially stronger. There are legitimate reasons for this. Policing is an adversarial profession, and police officers need protections beyond those offered to other professions so that they can do their job effectively without being subject to improper influence. Think of a police officer who pulls over a powerful public figure for drunk driving. It benefits society that the officer can do his duty, confident that he will not be penalized for it. But the current police accountability system has grown dysfunctional. Disciplinary processes routinely take years rather than months and now rival criminal prosecutions in their complexity. The result is that it has become nearly impossible for police services to terminate the employment of incompetent, corrupt, or abusive officers. Any reforms that made this process more manageable would be warmly embraced by both civil libertarians and police leadership.
But while the need for some police reforms is apparent, the current debate has reached a fevered pitch. Otherwise responsible politicians and public figures have determined that policing as an institution is broken and systematically racist. This is a mischaracterization and it does a disservice to the thousands of dedicated police officers who serve their communities diligently every day. More ominously, it corrodes one of the key institutions that anchor the liberal democratic state. Systemic racism is a malleable concept. As praxis for the social justice movement, its obscurity is its strength because its existence does not have to be supported by specific evidence. In the current environment, systemic racism has become a pseudo-religious concept, an invisible yet malevolent force that torments the oppressed from within society’s institutions. As such, failure to declare sufficient fealty to efforts opposing it provide a ready cudgel with which the mob can denounce anyone who disputes the febrile excesses of social justice activism.
When anti-racism activists cite evidence of systemic racism, they invariably point to statistics that demonstrate marginalized people make up a disproportionate share of those involved adversely with the justice system. In Canada, this is reflected in the oft-cited statistic that Indigenous Canadians make up five percent of the population but now account for 30 percent of the federal inmate population, up significantly since the year 2000. Activists claim this proves that systemic racism not only exists, but is growing, and they identify “over-policing” as the root cause of this disparity. But are Indigenous communities really over-policed?
Over the last 20 years there has been a massive increase in awareness of Indigenous issues in Canada. Police forces throughout the country now train officers in bias management, Indigenous history and other methodologies designed to foster critical thinking and social awareness. The Canadian justice system for its part has made significant structural changes to address the high proportion of Indigenous inmates in the prison population, most notably through the Gladue principles which require judges to take an Indigenous accused’s background into account during sentencing, usually resulting in a reduced sentence. Amid this increased awareness is it logical to conclude that those who work within the justice system have become more racist?
A closer examination of the facts would suggest otherwise. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, for instance, found that on-reserve Indigenous people in Canada are charged with fewer property offences than non-Indigenous people but more violent ones.1 This suggests that, if anything, officers are more lenient when dealing with Indigenous offenders for minor property crimes and engage the criminal justice system only in the case of more serious offences in which a victim has been the subject of violence. That was certainly my experience when I worked in those communities. It’s also notable that over a third of Indigenous men in federal prisons are serving sentences for sexual offences.2 These charges are by nature complaint-generated rather than resulting from discretionary policing practices.
In reality, the underlying cause of high rates of Indigenous incarceration results from higher rates of criminality. That’s not a moral judgement. Toxic combinations of poverty, geographic isolation, family breakdown, and substance abuse underpin this pathology. Demographic differences do as well—46 percent of the Indigenous Canadian population is under the age of 25 compared to only 30 percent in the non-Indigenous population. As anyone who witnessed the surge in crime rates that occurred as the baby boomers reached adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s can attest, populations with a large cohort of young people experience much higher crime rates. None of these factors is subject to influence from law enforcement.
Beyond statistics, one only needs to follow current events to witness the differential treatment that police deliver to Indigenous communities. In February of this year, a group of Indigenous protestors barricaded the busiest rail line in Canada over a political dispute. For weeks, the country’s economy ground to a halt as police declined to enforce court injunctions and negotiated with the protestors. This was by no means an aberration. A decade ago, Indigenous protestors barricaded parts of a town in south-western Ontario for months, issuing Indigenous “passports” to local non-Indigenous residents that regulated access to and from their own homes. Media crews and members of the public were assaulted on numerous occasions while police officers stood by, rarely intervening.3 It is hard to envision any non-Indigenous group of protestors, regardless of the cause, being treated with such deference by Canadian law enforcement.
But these nuances are lost in the current reductionist environment. Journalists, traditionally skeptical gate keepers of knowledge who once prided themselves on swimming against the current of prevailing social trends, now lead the charge to storm the ramparts. Every negative interaction between a police officer and an Indigenous or other racialized person is now sensationalized as further proof that policing is brutal and racist, with some going so far as to suggest that policing should be completely abolished. Such radicalism was once the exclusive purview of rabid student unions or delusional freemen on the land. Today this madness has found its way into the opinion pages of formerly venerable liberal establishment newspapers like the New York Times.
While I’m troubled by these developments, it’s not the criticism that bothers me. After all, I’m now on the back nine of what has been a successful and satisfying career. What does scare me, more as a citizen than a police officer, is the attempt by opportunistic politicians, academics, and much of the media to completely delegitimize law enforcement as an institution. 2020 has brought a pandemic, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1919, an economic collapse that rivals that of 1929, and social unrest reminiscent of 1968. If anything, this year has shown us how fragile the fabric that binds society can be. The coming year promises more disruption as the government largesse that has alleviated much of the economic pain caused by lockdowns begins to run out just as the United States enters what promises to be its most contentious election since the Civil War. There is a real danger that millions of people now marching in support of Black Lives Matter and snapping up copies of White Fragility will find themselves facing economic catastrophe as mortgages come due and small business owners give up. Under such circumstances, it’s not hard to envision an environment where those now professing allyship to the contemporary social justice movement revert to the more traditional human quality of tribalism, something that has existed in our nature since the first group of humans met the second group of humans on the African savannah.
If that happens, the only hope civilization has is a shared respect for the institutions that have been built up over centuries. Rule of law, responsible government, a free press that adheres to journalistic principles, and yes, professional law enforcement that enjoys broad-based public support. Without that shared understanding, we as a society are entering uncharted territory. Those on the Left who currently march shouting that “all cops are bastards” and those on the Right who believe that society’s institutions are all part of the “Deep State swamp” should heed the warning offered by Stanford historian Ian Morris who challenges Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that “the 10 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’” They are not. In reality, Morris says, the 10 most terrifying words in the English language are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.”4
The author is a senior officer with a large police service in Ontario, Canada who has spent most of his career in major crime investigation. He is currently undertaking graduate studies in management. “Mike Wilson” is an alias.
References:
1 Robinson, Viola; Dussault, Rene; Erasmus, George; Chartrand, Paul; Meekison, Peter; Stillett, Mary; Wilson, Bertha: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Bridging the Cultural Divide—A Report on Aboriginal People and the Criminal Justice System in Canada, February 1996 p. 35.
2 MacGillivary, Anne, Comaskey, Brenda: Black Eyes All the Time: Intimate Violence, Aboriginal Women and the Justice System, University of Toronto Press, 1999 p. 55.
3 Blatchford, Christie, Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy and How the Law Failed All of Us, Houndhead Press, 2011.
4 Morris, Ian, War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2014 p. 17.
Image: Brett Morrison (Flickr).
The demonstrations are no longer directed against racism, but against the symbols of the country’s history. The National Guard has been deployed to protect monuments. Here on June 2nd, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..
Protests across the West against racism in the United States are masking the evolution of the conflict there. It has evolved from a questioning of the remnants of black slavery to a conflict that could challenge the integrity of the country.
Last week I pointed out that the United States should have disbanded after the break-up of the Soviet Union to which it was attached. However, the imperialist project (the "Endless War") led by George W. Bush had made it possible to revive the country after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I also pointed out that in recent decades, the population had moved around a great deal in order to regroup by cultural affinity [1]. Inter-racial marriages were again becoming rare. I concluded that the integrity of the country would be threatened when non-black minorities entered the challenge [2].
This is precisely what we are witnessing today. The conflict is no longer between blacks and whites, since whites have become the majority in some anti-racist demonstrations, Hispanics and Asians have joined the processions, and the Democratic Party is now involved.
Since Bill Clinton’s term in office, the Democratic Party has identified with the process of financial globalization; a position that the Republican Party belatedly supported, without ever fully adopting it. Donald Trump represents a third path: that of the "American dream", i.e. entrepreneurship as opposed to finance. He got elected by declaring America First! which did not refer to the pro-Nazi isolationist movement of the 1930s as claimed, but to the relocation of jobs as later verified. He was certainly supported by the Republican Party, but remains a "Jacksonian" and not a "conservative" at all.
As historian Kevin Phillips - Richard Nixon’s electoral adviser - has shown, Anglo-Saxon culture gave rise to three successive civil wars [3] :
the first English Civil War, known as the "Great Rebellion" (which pitted Lord Cromwell against Charles I 1642-1651);
the second English Civil War or "War of Independence from the United States" (1775-1783);
and the Third Anglo-Saxon Civil War or "Civil War" in the United States (1861-1865).
What we are witnessing today could lead to the fourth. This seems to be the view of former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis, who recently told The Atlantic that he was concerned about President Trump’s divisive rather than unifying policies.
Let us go back to the history of the United States to see where the sides are. Populist President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) vetoed the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) established by Alexander Hamilton, one of the fathers of the Constitution, who favoured federalism because he was violently opposed to democracy. Just as Jackson’s disciple, Donald Trump, is today in opposition to the Fed.
Twenty years after Jackson, came the "Civil War" to which today’s protesters all refer. According to them, it pitted a slave South against a humanist North. The movement that began with a racist news item (the lynching of black George Flyod by a white policeman from Minneapolis) continues today with the destruction of statues of southern generals, including Robert Lee. Actions of this type had already taken place in 2017 [4], but this time they are gaining momentum and governors from the Democratic Party are participating.
The Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, announced the removal of a famous statue of General Lee at the request of white protesters. It is no longer a question of fighting racism, but of destroying the symbols of the country’s unity.
However, this narrative does not correspond at all to reality: at the beginning of the Civil War, both sides were slavers, and at the end, both sides were anti-slavers. The end of slavery owes nothing to the abolitionists and everything to the need for both sides to enlist new soldiers.
The Civil War pitted a rich, Catholic, agricultural South against a Protestant, industrial North aspiring to make a fortune. It crystallized around the issue of customs duties which the South believed should be set by the federal states, but which the North intended to abolish between the federal states and have the federal government determine.
Therefore, in debunking the Southern symbols, the current demonstrators are not attacking the remnants of slavery, but denouncing the Southern vision of the Union. It was particularly unfair to attack General Lee, who had put an end to the Civil War by refusing to pursue it with guerrilla warfare from the mountains and by choosing national unity. In any case, these degradations effectively pave the way for a fourth Anglo-Saxon civil war.
Today the notions of South and North no longer correspond to geographical realities: it would rather be Dallas against New York and Los Angeles.
It is not possible to choose the aspects of a country’s history that one considers good and to destroy those that one considers bad without calling into question everything that has been built on it.
In referring to Richard Nixon’s 1968 election slogan, "Law and Order," President Donald Trump is not trying to preach racist hatred as many commentators claim, but is returning to the thinking of the author of that slogan, Kevin Philipps (quoted above). He still intends to make Andrew Jackson’s thought triumph over Finance by relying on Southern culture and not to cause the disintegration of his country.
President Donald Trump finds himself in the situation Mikhail Gorbachev experienced at the end of the 1980s: his country’s economy - not finance - has been in sharp decline for decades, but his fellow citizens refuse to acknowledge the consequences [5]. The United States can only survive by setting new goals. Such change is particularly difficult in times of recession.
Paradoxically, Donald Trump is clinging to the "American dream" (i.e., the possibility of making a fortune) when US society is stuck, the middle classes are disappearing, and new immigrants are no longer European. At the same time only its opponents (the Fed, Wall Street and Silicon Valley) are proposing a new model, but at the expense of the masses.
The problem of the USSR was different, but the situation was the same. Gorbachev failed and it was dissolved. It would be surprising if the next US president, whoever he may be, succeeded.
By Ajamu Baraka and Bahman Azad
Co-Chairs of the Embassy Protectors Defense Committee
On February 4, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell issued a ruling on what the jurors will be allowed to be told in the trial of the Embassy Protectors scheduled to begin on February 11. She granted most of the government’s requests to prevent the jury from hearing important facts about the case, leaving the protectors with little in the way of a defense.
The courtroom will not be an oasis of truth in Washington, DC. The fact that Nicolas Maduro is the lawful president of Venezuela, not the coup leader Juan Guaido, cannot be uttered in that courtroom. Even though everyone, including the judge and prosecutors, knows that Guaido has not served one nanosecond as president since his self-declared presidency one year ago, the jurors will not be allowed to be told that critical fact. They will be led to believe that Guaido’s fake ambassador Carlos Vecchio is real.
Judge Howell argued that the court was bound by precedent that says courts must accept the decision of the president as to who is the leader of a foreign country. If the president says Mickey Mouse is president and Donald Duck and Goofy are his ambassadors of another sovereign country, then in the US courts that is the legal fiction they must abide by.
This is important in the Embassy Protectors’ case because the government’s excuse for entering the embassy to make false arrests was based on Carlos Vecchio, a fake ambassador of a fake president, giving them permission and ordering the eviction of the protectors. He was the Donald Duck to Guaido’s Mickey Mouse.
Other relevant topics that cannot be discussed are international law and events during the first 33 days in the embassy. The jury won’t be told that it is standard practice for governments to negotiate protecting power agreements, which was going on while the protectors were in the embassy. The jury will not know that the Protectors were prepared to leave the embassy voluntarily once a protecting power agreement was reached between the US and Venezuela.
The jury won’t know the Trump administration violated the Vienna Convention by raiding the embassy on May 16. The protectors cannot talk about the facts that the State Department failed to protect the embassy from break-ins by pro-coup advocates and that they allowed the breaking of windows and doors, defacing of the embassy and both threats and assaults of people inside and outside of the embassy.
The judge believes this information will confuse the jurors. Yes, the jurors would be confused if they knew the police allowed the Embassy to be damaged and stood by as people were assaulted, but it is members of the Embassy Protection Collective who were charged with interfering with their so-called “protection of the embassy.”
The judge also ruled the protectors could not argue that their First Amendment political rights were violated.
The protectors are not completely defenseless. Judge Howell ruled that the statute for interfering with protective function requires the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the four protectors acted knowingly and willfully, meaning they had an intent to break the law. She is permitting the protectors to say they believe that Maduro is president, but they can’t state the fact that he is the president.
The trial of the four Embassy Protection Collective members begins on February 11 and is expected to last about one week. The trial starts at 9:00 am at the Prettyman Courthouse, 333 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC, room 22-A, Judge Beryl Howell.
We want a physical presence at the courthouse on the 11th. However, because individuals entering the courthouse may be potential jurors, we are calling on all supporters of embassy protectors not to approach any individuals with handouts who may be entering the courthouse. For information about what is deemed appropriate behavior on the day of the trial see Call For Support at the Upcoming Hearing and Trial.
With all these restrictions imposed on the Protectors, the chances of their conviction have increased dramatically. It is clear that we now have a longer, more protracted legal battle on our hands. We therefore need to raise the level of our fundraising goal for their legal defense and ask our supporters to continue making donations. You can contribute to the legal defense fund of the Protectors at DefendEmbassyProtectors.org.