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You may work at a university and think none of this concerns you. No one is investigating you. No one is threatening your livelihood. No external investigator is shouting bizarre accusations about “planting evidence” while refusing to explain what evidence she means. You are doing your work, collecting your salary and assuming that, should anything trul…

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I have two West Highland Terriers that I adore. Recently, however, the female developed a rather obsessive habit of licking the male’s ear. Being human—and therefore prone to sentimental self-deception—I interpreted this behaviour with all the emotional sophistication available to our species. I imagined hidden emotional depths. Loyalty. Affection. Mate…

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Let there be no ambiguity.

I did not assault a student.

There was no torn shirt. No police incident. No arrest. No handcuffs. No five-year history of violence, criminality, or dangerous conduct.

There was no event to exaggerate. There was no event at all.

In thirteen years as a professor, I did not so much as raise my voice to a student. Yet within hours of my suspension, a lurid fiction was travelling through the workplace: I had assaulted a student, ripped his shirt, been arrested, been led away in handcuffs, and had somehow accumulated a long history of violent misconduct.

Five witnesses substantiated the same story - they heard it from staff, who, in turn, said they heard it from management. They had witnesses!

It became a de facto historical truth within two weeks. Lies are effective.

The institution eventually acknowledged to me, privately and in writing, that no assault had occurred. But it refused to say so publicly. It allowed the lie to circulate, settle, and perform its work. Only after my reputation had been poisoned did the institution quietly concede what it had known all along.

It was a management-manufactured lie.

The damage was done.

The fiction had accomplished precisely what such fictions are designed to accomplish. It transformed a professor with no history of violence into a supposed menace. It created an atmosphere in which almost any punishment could be presented not as retaliation, but as institutional protection.

First, invent the danger.

Then punish the dangerous man.

Management did not publicly correct the lie. It did not investigate who invented it, who circulated it, or why five people heard exactly the same defamatory account.

But the institution certainly benefited from it.

When I tried to stop the defamation, the institution did not investigate those spreading it.

It threatened me.

I was warned in writing by the Humber Manager of Public Safety that asking university employees to stop defaming me could itself be treated as criminal harassment and that, unless I remained silent, I might be arrested.

Consider the inversion. Their employees could portray me as a violent criminal. My request that they stop was treated as a possible crime.

Two leading defamation lawyers reviewed the material and concluded that I had an excellent case. I signed a retainer agreement. I was prepared to proceed.

Then came the arithmetic.

To litigate properly in Superior Court, I would have had to risk my retirement, my home, and farmland in Alberta that my grandfather purchased in 1928.

That land is part of my family’s history.

It is not a litigation fund.

I could not responsibly sell it, mortgage it, or place it at risk in a legal system that makes justice ruinously expensive for an individual while allowing wealthy institutions to convert every motion, disclosure request, and procedural quarrel into another invoice. They have unlimited taxpayer-funded resources.

I did not step back because the case was weak.

I stepped back because even a strong case can destroy the person bringing it.

The University of Guelph, Humber College, and OPSEU can draw upon public funds, tuition revenue, union dues, insurers, and teams of lawyers. They can multiply motions, prolong disclosure, contest every document, and exhaust an individual before a witness is ever called.

All this to resist a potential payment amounting to a fraction of that sum.

This is not prudence.

It is institutional impunity.

Eight lawyers can be deployed against one man.

Every request for evidence can be met with silence.

Every route to adjudication can be delayed until the individual runs out of money, health, or time.

The institutions could have investigated the defamation immediately. They could have corrected the assault story. They could have asked who invented it, who spread it, and why it was allowed to shape the workplace.

Instead, they spent a fortune avoiding those questions.

For me to pursue justice could mean losing everything my family spent generations building.

A person may possess the documents, the witnesses, the truth, and the support of experienced lawyers—and still be unable to afford the machinery required to make a powerful institution answer.

Evidence is not enough.

One must also be rich enough to survive the process.

That leaves me with one realistic legal avenue: the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

My case has been stalled there since November 2025.

There has been no hearing. No witness has been examined. No evidence has been tested. My repeated requests for information have gone unanswered. The vice-chair assigned to the case has provided no meaningful indication of when—or whether—the matter will be adjudicated.

I may now have to retain counsel and seek judicial review merely to force the Labour Board to hear a case already before it.

Not to win.

Not to obtain damages.

Simply to compel a public tribunal to perform its most elementary function: hold a hearing.

It is preserving the only legal route still available that does not require me to gamble my retirement, my home, and my grandfather’s land against the legal budgets of three enormous institutions.

Those institutions do not need to defeat my evidence.

• They need only prevent anyone from hearing it.

• They do not have to explain how a wholly fabricated allegation of student assault entered the workplace.

• They do not have to explain why management failed to correct it after acknowledging that no assault occurred.

• They do not have to explain why five witnesses heard substantially the same defamatory story.

• They do not have to explain why I was threatened with arrest for asking that it stop.

• They do not have to explain why radical anti-Israel and pro-Hamas faculty helped contact activist organizations, including Stop Zionist Hate, and mobilize tens of thousands of messages demanding that I be fired.

This was not ordinary criticism.

It was an organized pressure campaign directed at my employer and intended to make my continued employment impossible.

Faculty helped summon thousands of hostile strangers into an effort to destroy my livelihood. My family and I endured threats, intimidation, and severe psychological harm.

That harm is not merely my characterization. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) accepted that I suffered a compensable psychological injury arising from these events.

My career was destroyed. My reputation was destroyed. My physical health was decimated. My psychological injury was formally recognized.

Yet I—not those who spread the stories, mobilized the campaign, or intensified the threats—was portrayed as the danger.

I had called Hamas Nazis, and at the University of Guelph-Humber, an institution that links its own social media to sites calling for the destruction of Israel, that is not merely grounds for dismissal, for defamation, it is also grounds for an expensive, publicly funded fight to deny me adjudication.

The Jew lover must be punished.

They will never stop.

When Melanie Spence Ariemma, the Vice Provost, radical anti-Israel zealot and wizard behind the curtain, was brought before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, one of their many lawyers, Danielle Douek of Lerners LLP, acting for the University of Guelph, stated in writing that I posed a physical-safety risk to Spence Ariemma.

I have never met Spence Ariemma, nor have I spoken with her on the phone, nor has she ever responded to emails about her many, many violations of my civil rights.

I withdrew from that proceeding. When the HRTO accepts institutional defamation without asking for evidence, of course, I don’t stand a chance.

Again, the facts are not ambiguous. The University of Guelph and Humber College had already admitted it was all a lie.

Yet counsel acting for the university still presented me to a public tribunal as physically dangerous.

The vocabulary changed. The defamation survived.

Once the invented assault could no longer be maintained, its emotional residue was preserved through vaguer expressions: safety risk, danger, concern, menace.

The factual allegation disappeared. The stain remained. That is how institutional defamation works.

A lie is planted, circulated, and allowed to shape perception. When it collapses, it is not honestly withdrawn. It is repackaged. The institution abandons the accusation but retains the atmosphere it created.

The senior administrator who ultimately fired me did not investigate who invented the assault story, who circulated it, or who helped expose my family to thousands of hostile strangers.

He fired me.

Bill Rosehart, then provost of the University of Guelph, had never met me.

He never interviewed me. He never answered a single email. He ignored my appeals. He ended a professor’s career without listening to him or extending the smallest courtesy of due process.

Nothing.

And how was he treated afterward?

He was rewarded.

He was appointed president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo.

The official who fired a professor he had never met, after a campaign poisoned by invented stories of assault and criminality, was not investigated.

He was elevated.

The same immunity appears within OPSEU.

A member of its senior executive wrote: “Every time I hear about Hitler, I fall in love again.”

Story on Nazi loving OPSEU executive

What happened to her?

Nothing.

OPSEU declined to discipline her. But ironically, OPSEU took tens of thousands of dollars in dues from me but refused to represent me, accusing me of a “hate crime” because I said I supported Israel and because I had condemned their favourite terrorist organization, Hamas.

A senior union figure may express affection for Hitler and apparently face no meaningful sanction. People within the union may indulge hatred of Jews or admiration for the Holocaust and remain protected.

But a professor who condemns Hamas and defends Israel can be abandoned and left to fight alone.

This is not neutrality.

It is moral inversion.

The institutions have not answered the evidence I documented concerning thousands of antisemitic posts associated with the professor who helped mobilize the campaign to have me fired.

They have not answered material describing Jews as subhuman, praising Hamas, invoking Hitler approvingly, or calling for Israel’s destruction.

The University of Guelph-Humber has not explained why university-affiliated social-media accounts were connected to posts calling for Israel’s eradication.

Who approved this material? Who monitored it? Why did no senior administrator intervene?

Why were students and faculty permitted to circulate eliminationist rhetoric while a professor who defended Israel was suspended, silenced, portrayed as violent, and fired?

The university has answered none of these questions. There is a scandal that any mature and honest organisation would have investigated. But the University of Guelph-Humber, Humber College and University of Guelph?

It has discovered that it does not have to.

This is Canada.

The governing boards are silent. The tribunals are silent. The institutional leaders are silent.

Every so often, one of their many lawyers sends another menacing letter to one unrepresented man. The law has no relevance; they are simply thugs and bullies. Their goal is to abuse, intimidate and threaten one man into exhaustion and acquiescence, and now they have the Labour Board on their side.

Then the institutions return to silence.

Shun. Delay. Outspend.

The system rewards the method.

Thank God that Fox News and The Times of Israel had the courage to report on the case. See links above.

The Canadian media? Do not make me laugh.

There is something exquisitely Kafkaesque about being condemned on the basis of anonymous testimony from people who cannot be questioned, whose claims cannot be properly tested, and who may never have existed as described.

The appeal offered no remedy. It was returned unread. A disciplinary hearing, mandated by the collective agreement, was cancelled.

The accused was denied witnesses.

The accusers - if they exist - were concealed.

The report judged itself.

Not one central figure has been independently investigated.

Not one has been disciplined.

Not one has been required to explain how fabricated allegations of violence and criminality entered the workplace and shaped the process.

Those who spread the stories were protected. Those who mobilized the campaign were left untouched. Those who denied due process were promoted.

The professor whose career, reputation, and health were destroyed has been left to finance the search for accountability on his own.

It asks whether one citizen can compel publicly funded universities, colleges, unions, and tribunals to submit their conduct to independent examination.

The funds may now be needed to retain counsel and to seek judicial review to compel the Labour Board to hear the case it has delayed since November 2025.

I am not asking a court to presume that I am right.

I am asking that the evidence be heard.

And the evidence returns us to the central fact these institutions have spent years trying to obscure.

That is what this is about.

Everything else—the invented assault, the fictitious arrest, the imaginary handcuffs, the fabricated history of criminality, and the insinuation that I am physically dangerous—is slanderous emotional residue designed to poison the workplace, isolate me, and make my destruction appear necessary.

And now eight lawyers are fighting me.

Why?

To ensure that I receive nothing.

To make certain that the pain endures.

To establish that a publicly funded university may connect its official social-media presence to material calling for Israel’s destruction and never answer for it.

To establish that faculty may describe Jews as subhuman and retain institutional protection.

To establish that a senior OPSEU executive may write that hearing about Hitler makes her “fall in love again” and face no discipline.

That is what they are spending seven figures to defend.

Not merely a lawsuit.

A principle.

The principle that institutional power need never apologize, explain, or submit to judgment.

They have already taken my career, my reputation, and much of my health.

Now they are spending millions to make sure I do not get a thing—and that no tribunal forces them to answer for what they did.

They do not have to defeat me.

They only have to outlast me.

My GoFundMe is the only thing standing between their silence and a hearing.

In this wretched economy, I understand that many people cannot contribute. Or maybe they already have.

But everyone can share.

I am digging my heels in; they will not bully me into submission, and my quest for justice is not over.

Donate $2 + up to legal fund

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There are words a civilization quietly stops using just before it forgets how to think.

It is a magnificent word, and like many magnificent words, it has fallen into disuse precisely when we need it most. To be glib is not merely to be smooth. It is to possess the outward appearance of intelligence without the burden of depth. It is f…

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There was a time when Canada measured itself against the best. We compared ourselves to the strongest economies in the democratic world and expected to compete with them. We did not aspire merely to remain respectable; we expected to lead. We thought of ourselves as a country with abundant resources, sound institutions, an educated population, and a political culture capable of producing sustained prosperity.

Today, the conversation has quietly changed.

That, more than any individual statistic, is the story of modern Canada.

Economists disagree on many things, but they tend to agree on the broad measures that reveal a nation’s long-term economic health: productivity, real GDP per capita, business investment, labour-market performance, and housing affordability. On each of these measures, Canada’s trajectory over the past decade has raised increasing concern from institutions such as the OECD, the IMF, and domestic economists. Productivity growth has lagged many comparable advanced economies. Business investment has weakened. Housing has become progressively less affordable. Growth in living standards has slowed. Increasingly, Canada’s headline economic growth has depended more on rapid population growth than on producing more wealth per person.

They suggest relative decline. The distinction matters.

A nation does not have to become poor to become poorer than its competitors. Olympic athletes understand this instinctively. The silver medallist is still extraordinary. But if a country that once routinely competed for gold spends a decade slipping to sixth, then eighth, then tenth, something important has changed. The country has not become incompetent. It has simply stopped improving as quickly as everyone else.

Canada increasingly resembles that athlete.

Yet this deterioration has produced remarkably little political consequence. Why?

The fashionable explanation is ignorance. Voters simply do not understand economics.

That is comforting, but I doubt it is true. The real explanation is far more human.

The economy is not experienced through OECD reports or Statistics Canada releases. It is experienced through a paycheque, a mortgage payment, a grocery bill, and the quiet confidence that next month will resemble this month.

As long as those things remain intact, national decline remains largely invisible.

Imagine a street with five homes.

One homeowner loses his job. His savings evaporate. The mortgage becomes impossible to pay. His children postpone university. Eventually, he sells the family home.

The other four households continue living comfortably.

From an economist’s perspective, that street has experienced a serious labour-market failure. Twenty percent unemployment on a single street is devastating.

From the perspective of democracy, however, eighty percent of the voters may conclude that life is carrying on quite normally.

That is the uncomfortable truth about aggregate statistics.

This is why deteriorating national indicators often fail to generate electoral punishment. Productivity can stagnate. Young people can struggle to find meaningful work. Housing can drift further out of reach. Business investment can slowly migrate elsewhere. None of this necessarily changes how a comfortable homeowner votes if his own circumstances remain stable.

People rarely vote for the national economy. They vote for their own.

Governments understand this better than economists. There is another political advantage that incumbents enjoy. Households must eventually live within their means.

Governments can borrow.

Debt allows today’s difficult choices to be postponed until tomorrow. Spending can continue. New programs can be announced. Ambitious infrastructure projects can be unveiled. The political rewards arrive immediately, while the financial costs are deferred to a future Parliament and, more importantly, a future generation.

Then there is the media.

In a Westminster parliamentary system, the official opposition exists to scrutinize the government. That is its constitutional purpose. Journalism has traditionally served a similar democratic function by examining whether those in power are governing effectively.

Yet modern political coverage often seems to drift toward personality rather than performance. Discussions of style, rhetoric, tone, and political theatre can crowd out sustained examination of long-term economic outcomes. Whether intentional or not, public debate risks becoming less about whether the country is becoming more prosperous and more about whether the opposition appears sufficiently reassuring.

Branding fills the gap.

Politics has become increasingly psychological. A calm demeanour is mistaken for competence. International credentials become proxies for effective domestic policy. A reassuring style creates the impression that difficult problems are being managed, even when many of the underlying indicators continue moving in the wrong direction.

Presentation begins to substitute for performance.

That is not unique to Canada.

But Canada appears especially susceptible to it. Perhaps because we have become accustomed to gradual decline rather than dramatic crisis.

History teaches that nations rarely collapse overnight.

They drift. Productivity weakens a little. Investment slows a little. Housing becomes slightly less attainable each year.

Young graduates leave for opportunities elsewhere, one family at a time.

Living standards stop rising as quickly as those of comparable countries.

None of these developments, by itself, feels revolutionary.

Together, they reshape a nation.

This raises a more unsettling question.

What percentage of the electorate must personally experience economic deterioration before it becomes politically decisive?

Is it enough for young Canadians to struggle if older homeowners remain comfortable?

Is it enough for graduates to leave if established professionals remain employed?

Is it enough for productivity to stagnate if supermarket shelves remain full?

Or does democratic accountability require something harsher—that a plurality of voters must first feel the decline in their own households before they demand a different course?

Perhaps there is another possibility.

Perhaps what is required is not greater hardship but greater empathy.

A society capable of looking beyond its own driveway would recognize that a country is not judged solely by whether today’s mortgage payment clears. It is judged by whether its children will inherit greater opportunity than their parents enjoyed.

That used to be Canada’s quiet promise.

It should be again.

Governments can remain popular while a country’s relative position slowly weakens because relative decline is almost invisible to those who have not yet been touched by it. Prosperity can erode long before most citizens notice. Nations seldom vote against decline while it is statistical. They usually do so only after it becomes personal.

By then, history suggests, the medal ceremony is already over.

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In high school, many of us read The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the Salem witch trials: a warning about hysteria masquerading as justice. We read it at a comfortable distance, almost smugly, as though it described an extinct moral species—the fruit of some ancient, diseased tree that modernity had long since cut down.

We surveyed the accusations, the panic, and the ruined lives and asked: How could they? How could ordinary people become so possessed by rumour and righteous certainty that they destroyed their neighbours without evidence? How could judges mistake accusation for proof, ministers mistake frenzy for virtue, and an entire community become so certain while being so catastrophically wrong?

A journalist who examined my case once said something that has never left me.

She was not commenting on a procedural irregularity or a badly drafted policy. She had recognized something older and more dangerous: hostility fused with moral certainty—the conviction that punishment is not merely permissible but virtuous, and that the accused has forfeited even the right to be heard.

My offence, such as it was, consisted of stating:

I stand with Israel, and Hamas are Nazis.

That, apparently, was enough.

My accuser did not debate me. He did not ask what I meant or attempt an answer. He denounced me to the credulous managers who govern the University of Guelph and Humber College—people who appear to fear controversy more than falsehood, and accusation less than dissent.

Then the institutional choir began.

The human-rights department supplied the pieties. The vice-provost supplied the authority. The accuser supplied the rage. Administrators and activists supplied the chorus. Together, they resembled the drum and fife playing a jaunty ceremonial tune while the condemned man is marched to the gallows.

My accuser, a professor deeply involved in anti-Western and pro-Palestinian organizations, reportedly boasted that he would contact tens of thousands of his friends and ask them to write to the university demanding my termination. He did so.

He did not rebut my statement. He pronounced it sinful and summoned the congregation. After encountering a student-altered screenshot of a comment I had made to a man calling for the destruction of Israel, my still-hidden accuser remained gripped by an almost theological fury.

Salem began with an accusation that acquired authority not because it was proved, but because it was delivered with passion. The modern university proceeds in much the same way. The accusation arrives clothed in the vocabulary of harm, safety, equity, trauma, and human rights.

The accusers condemn without confronting the accused. Administrators act without testing the accusation. The process begins not with “What happened?” but with “What must be done about him?”

It is the old cry in updated language: Expel the devil. Purge the contaminant. Restore the community’s moral health.

At Salem, the devil was said to be among the villagers. In the moral inversion of the modern university, the devil becomes the person who condemns a terrorist organization that teaches children to regard the murder of Jews as sacred. The institution turns the moral landscape upside down and congratulates itself for standing upright.

My accuser and lead inquisitor was a Professor Ramadan, a man who never had the courage to introduce himself to me, but who publicly howled for my removal and poured out hostility toward Israel and Jews.

As I have documented it, his public record included blood libels, Holocaust inversion, praise for Iran’s proxies, attacks upon the West, and antisemitic invective.

Yet in the modern Canadian university, such conduct may confer influence rather than disgrace when carried beneath the approved ideological banner. Ramadan claimed to speak for Muslim students, staff, and faculty, and the institution behaved as though the claim itself endowed him with jurisdiction.

Others joined him, swollen with borrowed certainty. They condemned not from knowledge but from affiliation—from the intoxicating righteousness of belonging to a cause they had scarcely examined.

That is where Salem comes into focus. The question is not whether our institutions possess computers, lawyers, policies, investigators, and procedural manuals. Salem had procedures, authorities, experts, doctrines, sworn testimony, and official records. The question is whether the human impulses beneath the machinery have changed.

They have not.

We imagine that education has immunized us. We point to science, law, technology, and especially to universities—those self-congratulatory citadels of reason. But progress has not necessarily made us more just. It has often made us more articulate in our certainty and more ingenious in excusing our cruelty.

I was suspended and eventually dismissed amid allegations of serious misconduct—claims advanced with immense confidence despite the absence of supporting evidence, and later withdrawn or acknowledged as unfounded.

These were not minor distortions orbiting somewhere near reality. They were grotesque enlargements, at times almost fantastical: acts of reputational vandalism.

Their abandonment did not repair the damage. One might as well drive a truck through the front of a house and then, standing among the bricks and broken furniture, explain that the brakes failed. Perhaps destruction was not intended. The house remains destroyed.

Before the decisions were made, none of my repeated requests for a meeting produced a conversation with those responsible. There was no genuine confrontation, no hearing in the ordinary human sense, no attempt to understand.

I was not heard.

I was processed.

What remains is not merely a legal dispute waiting to be arranged into numbered paragraphs. It is the lived experience: the sleepless nights, the disbelief, the mind returning helplessly to the same question—why? It is the shock of discovering how little resistance cruelty and betrayal encounter once they have been placed inside an approved procedure.

And the performance continues. The venue is now the Labour Board, where seven lawyers, neatly arrayed, continue to advance insinuations without having met me or heard my account. They marinate in their own professionalism, as though a careful modulation of tone might disinfect the substance of their conduct.

It cannot.

The prose may be polished. The machinery may be decorous. The injury is not thereby made civil.

The months of delay possess their own cruelty. Delay exhausts, isolates, and consumes time until resistance itself begins to appear unreasonable. Salem had the dungeon and the gallows. Bureaucracy has postponement, silence, expense, and attrition. The instruments have changed; the purpose remains recognizable: break the accused before his claims can be heard.

Even evidence that senior figures within OPSEU—the union charged with representing me—had expressed grotesquely antisemitic, pro-Hitler, or other radically anti-Israel views was treated as irrelevant to whether bias might have shaped their treatment of a man whose offence was standing with Israel.

The union accused me on the first day of committing a hate crime, refused meaningful engagement, and ultimately abandoned me.

That was not representation. It was participation.

The magistrates of Salem must have enjoyed much the same self-regard. They, too, believed themselves custodians of order.

Cruelty does not disappear when it acquires credentials. It does not become less cruel because educated people administer it using longer words from behind heavier desks. It becomes more efficient, more insulated, and more certain of itself. It sheds the mob’s vulgarity and assumes the committee’s composure.

What emerges is colder than rage: bureaucratic cruelty. Ideological cruelty. Cruelty conducted in the language of professionalism, protected by “process,” and persuaded that its own privatized documentation is the same as justification.

Salem eventually admitted “spectral evidence”: claims that an accused person’s spirit had appeared invisibly to torment a victim. One woman’s spectre had supposedly choked an accuser in the night. Another had appeared with the devil and demanded a e signature in his book. Invisible familiars attacked the afflicted.

Such claims could not be tested. That was their advantage. They were constructed to make disproof impossible.

Within hours, vivid stories circulated: that I had assaulted a student, ripped his shirt, been handcuffed, and been led away. A staff member claimed to possess “inside knowledge” and “many witnesses.” Anonymous insinuations of sexual impropriety emerged—not stated plainly enough to be answered, but released into the atmosphere so that imagination could complete the accusation.

On Instagram, I had supposedly communicated with and “threatened” two anonymous girls. When I showed the investigator that my account contained no messages from the relevant period, innocence did not follow. The accusation had already acquired the status of moral truth.

Perhaps the most insidious allegation was that I had told students not to report me. I said no such thing. No evidence supported it. Yet it served the same function as the Salem claim that a witch had warned her victims not to reveal what she had done.

“She bids me not tell,” said the accuser at Salem.

“He warned students not to come forward,” says the modern inquisitor.

The structure is identical. The accusation contains its own hidden premise: there must have been wrongdoing to conceal. Once that premise is accepted, the conclusion is already embedded. Silence proves fear. Denial proves deception. The absence of evidence proves how successfully the offender suppressed it.

This is Salem’s logic exactly.

At Salem, denial did not count against the accusation. It was treated as evidence of cunning. The invisible character of the alleged offence made contrary evidence irrelevant. The accused could neither confess without condemning himself nor deny without confirming his deceit.

The accused is invited to participate only by confessing. To defend oneself is to commit the additional offence of resistance.

Spectral evidence indeed.

This is how hysteria grows. A claim is made. It is repeated, embellished, and insulated from verification. Then it ceases to be treated as an allegation and becomes the background assumption against which every later fact is interpreted. The question is no longer whether it is true.

The question becomes: Who would dare doubt it?

At Salem, the accused were nominally permitted to defend themselves, but only within a structure that had already accepted the reality of witchcraft and the reliability of the accusers. The proceedings were not inquiries into guilt. They were performances of certainty.

Those performances were not conducted merely by the ignorant.

The judges, magistrates, ministers, and legal officials of Salem were among the educated figures of their society. They cited doctrine. They followed accepted intellectual frameworks. They believed themselves rational and responsible.

Education did not restrain hysteria.

It refined it.

That is the most uncomfortable parallel. Sophisticated moral panics do not arise merely at society’s margins. They flourish within its intellectual centre.

A community convinced of its moral superiority is especially vulnerable to panic because it interprets doubt not as prudence but as corruption. To question the accusation is to side with the accused. To demand evidence is to compound the harm. To seek proportion is to reveal one’s own moral deficiency.

My case was driven by institutional antisemitism. Not incidentally, not ambiguously, and not as one influence among many. I was fighting an institution that had made its accommodation with antisemitism—and I was punished for refusing to make mine.

These were not stray acts committed at the university’s margins. They were tolerated, connected to, displayed, and thereby legitimized by the institution itself. When hatred is repeated openly, housed under official auspices, and protected from consequence, it is no longer merely the prejudice of individuals. It has become institutional.

And when I fought it, the institution followed the ancient rule of corrupted institutions: it made the dissenter the problem.

The deeper failing is human: our preference for accusation over inquiry, certainty over doubt, narrative over evidence, and solidarity with the mob over fidelity to conscience. Institutions magnify that failing. They give prejudice offices, titles, policies, committees, lawyers, and letterhead. They teach cowardice to speak in the grave tones of procedure.

It is cruelty made procedural.

I have rarely encountered people crueler than those who parade their counterfeit virtue through human-rights offices; administrators who speak endlessly of dignity while treating an actual human being as refuse; the vice-provost and provost who were prepared not merely to destroy a career, but to endanger a family, a marriage, a home—the whole fragile architecture of another person’s life; the jackal lawyers who would lie to the devil himself if the exchange could be entered on a timesheet; and the petty bureaucrats who tremble in person yet discover a giant’s courage when safely concealed behind a keyboard.

There is anger in this. How could there not be? But beneath the anger is something more difficult to carry: sorrow.

It is the sorrow of discovering how cheaply people will sell their consciences. The sorrow of watching institutions that advertise compassion practise abandonment. The sorrow of realizing that educated people—people fluent in every fashionable language of inclusion—can look upon the suffering of a Jew and find not a reason to pause, but permission to proceed.

What lingers is the shock of seeing how easily a human being can be placed outside the circle of concern. No one paused to say: We have not heard from him. We should. No one asked what this campaign was doing to a person, a family, or a life. My humanity had become inconvenient, and inconvenience is the one form of diversity the modern university will not tolerate.

We flatter ourselves that we have moved beyond Salem because we no longer burn witches.

But reputations can still be burned. Livelihoods can still be taken. Families can still be placed under intolerable strain. A person can be isolated, defamed, and discarded by people serenely persuaded that they are doing good. The pyre has disappeared; the appetite for sacrifice has not.

That is not progress.

It is adaptation.

But the witch trials were procedural too. They had hearings, testimony, experts, records, rules, and authorized decision-makers. What they lacked was humility. What they lacked was reflection. What they lacked was the elementary moral courage to ask:

What if we are wrong?

That question—not any policy, office, committee, tribunal, or solemnly worded report—is what separates justice from cruelty.

Without it, process becomes theatre. Accusation becomes verdict. Cowardice becomes collegiality. Prejudice becomes policy. Bureaucracy becomes machinery.

And persecution acquires a letterhead.

We no longer accuse in the village square. We accuse through committees, reports, investigations, and silence.

We no longer rely upon spectres. We rely upon anonymous impressions, subjective harm, insinuation, and testimony that cannot be meaningfully challenged.

We no longer place the accused before a magistrate who believes in witches. We place him before administrators who believe their own institution cannot persecute because it possesses a human-rights department.

In the English witch hunts, the accused were sometimes bound and thrown into water. If she floated, the water had rejected her and she was guilty. If she sank, she was innocent—assuming they pulled her out before the proof became fatal.

It was a perfect system: survival incriminated her, while innocence required her to drown.

We have improved upon it. The modern accused is offered much the same choice without the inconvenience of a pond. Defend yourself, and your resistance confirms your guilt. Remain silent, and your silence does the same. Ask for evidence, and you inflict further harm. Protest the process, and the protest becomes another charge.

The old inquisitors at least required water. We require only paperwork, delay, and a committee sufficiently persuaded of its own goodness.

The difference between then and now is not justice.

The difference is the method—and the melancholy fact that we have learned to drown a person without getting our hands wet.

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There is a certain intellectual laziness in the now-familiar lament that “print is dying,” as though the decline of ink on paper were the central cultural drama of our time. It is not. Paper is merely a delivery mechanism. If anything, the technological conditions for serious reading have never been more favourable. High-resolution screens, instantaneous distribution, and—most tellingly—the explosion of audio have removed nearly every practical barrier to engaging with long-form thought.

A citizen today can read an essay on a phone sharper than any broadsheet, or listen to an entire book while walking, commuting, or lying in bed. When I was young, audiobooks existed in a primitive form—cassettes, boxed and clumsy. Today, entire libraries travel in one’s pocket. If access were the problem, we would be living through a reading renaissance.

We are not.

The “death of print” thesis is therefore a comforting distraction. Digital did not destroy reading; it made reading easier. Audio did not compete with books; it expanded them. If the appetite for sustained argument still existed, it would have flourished. Instead, we find ourselves in a paradox of abundance and intellectual scarcity.

What has declined is not merely the newspaper, but the habit of mind newspapers—at their best—once cultivated. And even the oft-repeated obituary for the newspaper is misunderstood. We are told newspapers died because the market killed them: classifieds migrated online, advertising splintered, and profitability eroded. There is truth in that, but it is only half the story.

The counterpoint is obvious. Digital media also gave newspapers something previous generations could scarcely imagine: potentially infinite scale. Distribution costs collapsed. Reach became global. A publication once confined to one city block could now circulate everywhere at once. If newspapers were simply victims of market forces, that technological revolution ought also to have offered a renaissance.

It did not.

Which suggests the “death of the newspaper,” like the “death of print,” is not primarily a market phenomenon but a cultural one.

The deeper collapse is not economic but civilizational.

The real casualty is the editorial tradition: the long-form, structured, morally serious attempt to persuade. Accuracy, so often invoked as journalism’s supreme virtue, is necessary but trivial. A stock ticker is accurate. A weather report is accurate. But neither teaches a citizen how to think.

The editorial once did.

That assumption—that the reader could follow an argument—now feels almost antique.

There was a time when even a partisan reader expected more than slogans. One might disagree, even violently, with a column, but one was required to engage with it. Arguments had structure. Conclusions followed premises. Readers were invited, however imperfectly, into the discipline of reasoning.

Today, that structure has collapsed.

The modern informational diet is not composed of arguments but of fragments: headlines, clips, reactions, denunciations. One does not read; one scrolls. One does not argue; one signals. The goal is no longer persuasion, but affirmation.

And one sees just how far this has gone with a simple question. Walk down any street and ask: Who is your favourite Canadian editorial writer? Most people will not even understand the question. Press them, and they will likely name a podcaster—perhaps someone like Joe Rogan—because in the modern imagination, ideas have been collapsed into personality, tone, and conversational immediacy.

Thirty years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

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Back then, even if one did not read editorials, one knew they existed—and that they mattered. Today, the editorial writer has not merely lost influence; they have lost recognition.

The result is not simply a decline in knowledge, but a collapse in intellectual habit.

I see this directly in my own classroom. In a class of fifty business students, I am fortunate if one or two read a daily newspaper. These are not disengaged individuals. They are ambitious, capable and often sharp in practical terms. And yet they move through their education with almost no exposure to structured argument about the very systems they intend to enter.

The decline goes further.

I wrote a 280-page textbook for my course. Not a doorstop, not an indulgence—simply a clear, structured attempt to lay out ideas properly. It even had a lot of pictures and charts, plenty of white space to lower reading anxiety.

The reaction was not indifferent. It was an offence. One student told me he intended to file a complaint with the department head over being required to read. At university.

That moment was clarifying.

This is not about ability. It is about conditioning.

The modern mind, fed a constant stream of short, stimulating, easily digestible content, has been retrained to resist sustained effort. We are surrounded by intellectual candy—immediate, pleasurable, and nutritionally empty. And like all such diets, it produces a kind of malnourishment that is not immediately visible, but deeply consequential.

This collapse of habit extends well beyond students.

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I encountered it in a more revealing form with a tenure-track professor at the University of Guelph. He was presented with my work detailing how his affiliated university had treated me—its tolerance for defamation, its failure to intervene and its broader institutional conduct. The material was documented, structured and evidence-based.

His response?

“It just doesn’t ring true.”

Not, “the evidence is flawed.” Not, “the claim is unsupported.” Simply: it doesn’t feel right.

But this was an academic. A professional reader.

And even there, the instinct was not to verify, but to react.

That is the shift.

I am scarcely fit to call myself a proper academic, but I am at least willing to read.

And sadly, I have met too many lawyers, professors, union leaders, and other heavily credentialed people who seem to regard reading more than 300 words as an unreasonable burden—if not a form of abuse.

Journalism has not resisted this drift. There has been a quiet migration from inquiry to advocacy. One reads the editorial pages of The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, or The New York Times, and encounters arguments that are often strikingly weak—assertion in place of logic, posture in place of reasoning.

And into this environment step the politicians—no longer required to persuade, only to brand.

Here, one begins to see the deeper problem. The modern political contest is not between ideas, but between brands—and some brands are simply better than others.

One side promises movement. The other advises hesitation. One offers the emotional satisfaction of doing; the other insists on the discipline of thinking. In a culture that has lost patience for thought, the outcome is not difficult to predict.

Policy becomes secondary. Language does the work.

Consider the New Democratic Party proposing government-run grocery stores. The economic realities—low margins, efficiency constraints, historical precedent—are beside the point. It sounds like action. It sounds like fairness. And so it resonates.

Or consider Mark Carney and the idea of a sovereign wealth fund financed through borrowing. The phrase itself is the argument. “Sovereign.” “Wealth.” It carries a kind of borrowed authority.

Strip away the language, and the logic becomes rather simpler.

It is the economic equivalent of a child saying, “I would like to start a savings account, but I do not wish to use my own money.” May I borrow the savings?

Any parent would recognize the problem instantly.

Did you hear Carney hinting about Canada joining the EU? It’s an idea divorced from reality, stupid on many levels, but about 50% of Canadians are both elbows and thumbs up on it.

But in a culture that no longer interrogates ideas, the packaging suffices.

This is not a generational issue. Boomers, like everyone else, operate within the same environment—responding to the same cues, the same branding, the same emotional shorthand.

And this has consequences.

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A democracy depends on citizens capable of engaging with arguments that cannot be reduced to slogans. It requires attention. It requires patience. It requires the willingness to think before reacting.

But the demagogue thrives when those habits disappear.

He does not need a 2,500-word argument. Twenty-five words will suffice.

What remains is identity.

Politics becomes a competition between brands. One does not evaluate policy; one selects a side. The process begins to resemble, in a way that should give us pause, the logic of dating applications: profiles presented, judgments made, commitments formed—without ever encountering the full person.

This is not how serious decisions are meant to be made.

The cumulative effect is a quiet erosion of critical thinking. Attention shrinks. Reading disappears. And increasingly, people do not even recognize what they have lost.

When that foundation weakens, the consequences are inevitable.

The tools for serious thought have never been more abundant.

What is missing is the desire to use them.

And in that absence—not in the death of print, not in the rise of digital, but in the quiet abandonment of critical thinking—the real crisis of modern democracy resides.

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Not by accident. Not through negligence. Deliberately.

He moves through the hospital corridors in his white coat, his face reddened with hubris, speaking solemnly about public health. He appears on panels. He raises money for disease prevention. He lectures those who will listen about compassion, vig…

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Dear “Christian”,

The alarm bells should already be ringing in the churches.

Not metaphorically. Literally, morally, spiritually, civilizationally ringing.

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For decades, enlightened Western intellectuals have bravely challenged the legitimacy of states created through imperial partition, colonial cartography, externally imposed sovereignty, demographic engineering, and mandate-era political improvisation.

To Jordan. Or, as activists insist on calling it, “the Transjordanian Construct.” Or the Hashemite monstrosity. Or the Hashemite Royal Theft.

Protesters at the University of Guelph, led by the firebrand faculty member Dr. Georgie Braguecia, have declared that although they want Jordan destroyed, they are simply anti-Hashemites, not prejudiced against Jordanians.

Baguerica explained that the Hashemites had no deep roots in Jordan—they were outsiders imposed by Britain, ruling over mostly Bedouin tribes with no prior unified “Jordanian” national identity.

Anti-Hashemite student organizers who insisted on speaking off the record noted that Jordan was a foreign monarchy gifted by imperial fiat, splitting what was supposed to be one territory, displacing local claims, and installing rulers from hundreds of miles away with no democratic consent.

“Death to Jordan!” Screamed University of Guelph sophomores at a recent protest outside the University of Guelph President Van Acker’s office. “Return the land to the Bedouins, give it to Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria! No gifts to royal families!”

Van Acker reportedly put on the now-ubiquitous red headband of the anti-Hashemites, which sent the protestors on their way.

The movement truly accelerated at the famous January 2026 TED Talk by Wetherby-Fairchild.

“Jordan,” Wetherby-Fairchild explained, “represents one of history’s clearest examples of a manufactured mandate-era geopolitical fiction.”

Wetherby-Fairchild clicked a slide showing Winston Churchill beside a map from 1921.

“There,” he said solemnly. “The original sin.”

Soon, graduate students across North America became electrified by the cause.

Anti-Zionism, many explained, had become “a bit mainstream.”

The headbands quickly became the defining symbol of the movement.

Inspired loosely by traditional Bedouin weaving patterns, the bands featured crimson geometric stitching against a white background, with repeating diamond motifs symbolizing what activists called “pre-colonial desert continuity pathways.” Most were manufactured in Portugal. But Shein had stolen the market by using slave labour in China.

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By autumn, entire university encampments had appeared beneath banners reading:

One particularly emotional protester at Columbia explained:

“My great-grandfather once vacationed in Damascus, so this issue affects my family deeply.”

Professor Amelia von Ashbury-Cromwell of the University of Guelph’s Institute for Decolonial Spatial Justice recently spoke before the Iranian-led UN committee on women’s rights and argued that Jordan constituted “a British-sponsored settler-adjacent monarchy superimposed upon organically contiguous regional identities.”

The accelerating movement is now integrated with a Syrian activist collective calling itself “Greater Bilad al-Sham Now,” which argues that northern Jordan has been artificially severed from historic Syrian geography.

Meanwhile, Saudi nationalist influencers insisted the Hashemite monarchy itself was historically external to the territory it governed and represented “colonial dynasty implantation.”

TikTok videos explaining these theories have accumulated millions of views, especially when paired with melancholic piano music and drone footage of deserts.

Anti-Transjordanism has now become culturally irresistible.

“We acknowledge that this seminar takes place upon historically fragmented Ottoman-adjacent administrative terrain impacted by mandate-era spatial disruption,” was the opening line introduced by the moderator at the movement’s first annual conference to be held at the University/College of Guelph-Humber in Toronto (The U of Guelph Humber recently voluntarily downgraded itself to a college).

The conference was themed “Decolonizing Desert Modernities.”

Featured workshops included:

Attendance sold out within hours.

One undergraduate activist explained the movement’s philosophy carefully.

“I’m not anti-Jordanian,” she clarified. “I just don’t believe Jordan has a moral right to exist in its current form.”

“Then what should happen to Jordan?” I asked.

“Oh, something peaceful,” she shrugged. “Maybe regional reintegration. Maybe restorative cartographic justice. Maybe ethical border redistribution. Maybe a lot of people just need to move.”

And so the movement marches on triumphantly beneath its crimson woven headbands, denouncing the “mandate-era Hashemite construct” while carefully reminding everyone that they held no animosity whatsoever toward actual Jordanians.

None at all.

They merely believed the country itself should eventually disappear.

A completely different thing.

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Tip?

There was a time—one scarcely dares to remember it—when language existed to clarify thought. Increasingly, it exists to evade it. Few developments better capture this decline than the rise of the rhetorical “-phobia,” a suffix that has escaped the confines of clinical psychology and now operates as a kind of intellectual kill switch.

“Islamophobia” is am…

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The Jewish people trace their covenantal line through Isaac—not as some parlour trick in ancestral vanity, but as the central claim of a civilization with a very long memory. “Through Isaac shall your offspring be called” is not decorative language. It is the narrowing clause—the defining line in the text. You may find that sort of exclusivity unfashionable, but scripture is not a modern HR policy; it makes distinctions and stands by them.

Now, before the gene-enthusiasts arrive with cotton swabs and grand declarations, let’s be clear about what genetics can and cannot do. You cannot swab a cheek, run it through a machine, and have it print out “Isaac confirmed.”

Genetics is not an Old Testament paternity test. It doesn’t work at the level of named individuals from four thousand years ago.

What it can do is more modest—and more useful. It can identify patterns: continuity, clustering and shared ancestry over long periods of time. And on that front, many studies of Jewish populations do in fact point to something notable.

Across Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi groups, there are consistent signals of shared Middle Eastern—specifically Levantine—ancestry.

Layered over that, of course, are centuries of diaspora, conversion, intermarriage, and local mixing. But the underlying pattern remains: this is not a people that simply imagined itself into being. There is a measurable degree of common lineage.

Even the often-abused priestly-line studies—the so-called Cohen markers—tell a restrained but interesting story. They do not prove Aaron, let alone Isaac. But they suggest that many who identify as Cohanim share a common paternal ancestry, preserved over the centuries. That’s not proof of scripture in a laboratory sense, but neither is it trivial. It points to continuity of a real tradition carried by a real population.

And here is where the contrast becomes unavoidable.

The claim that “the Arabs,” or worse still “the Muslims,” descend from Ishmael in any clear, universal, biological sense quickly collapses under scrutiny.

“Muslim” is a religious identity encompassing Indonesians, Persians, Turks, Pakistanis, Bosniaks and West Africans—hardly a single lineage. Even “Arab,” while narrower, is historically layered and genetically diverse. Population genetics does not reveal a clear, shared ancestry tying all these groups back to a single common ancestor. It reveals heterogeneity, mixture, and regional variation.

That does not make the Ishmael tradition meaningless. It places it where most ancient genealogies belong: in the realm of sacred narrative and civilizational identity. Historically, the identification of Arabs with Ishmael develops over time, gaining clarity and prominence in later interpretations. It may be a powerful story. But it is not a biological registry for millions of people across continents.

So the sober conclusion is this. There is no definitive genetic proof that Jews can trace a lineage to Isaac as an individual. But there is evidence of a notable degree of shared ancestry among Jewish populations—evidence consistent with long-standing continuity as a people. That does not prove Isaac. But it does not sit comfortably with the idea that the claim is pure invention either.

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Not ordinary vanity. Not the small political vanity of wanting a photograph near a happy crowd. This was something more revealing: out-of-control narcissism, the inability to witness a national moment without assuming it somehow requires your presence, your voice, your interpretation, your little serm…

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You can also just put a comment on any of the essays, and I will see it there. Less weight will go to comments that include the words “dirty, loser, idiot, moron, jackass, genocider…

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It began, as many moral catastrophes do, with a campus protest, a megaphone, and several people who had recently learned the phrase “settler colonialism” and were now determined to apply it to everything except their own rent-controlled apartments.

A coalition of activists, professors, NGO consultants, professional sign-…

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Dr. Casey Babb is part of a new generation of Zionist thinkers, refusing to cede the intellectual battlefield. A national security scholar with deep ties to Israel, Canada, and the U.K., Babb has emerged as a forceful voice arguing that in a post–Oct. 7 world, defending Zionism is no longer enough — it must be asserted, defined, and unapologetically cha…

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Mark Carney recently declared that “Muslim values are Canadian values,” one more carefully focus-grouped slogan from a political class that increasingly mistakes applause lines for analysis.

Mr. Carney’s talent is not conviction. It is calibration. It is the art of telling people what they want to hear in the moment. He is very good at it.

He is the hu…

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