Confessions of a Heretic - The Gospel of Shut Up

How “Watch What You Say” Became the New Blasphemy Law of the Secular Church

Part one of three in Freedom To Offend’s ‘Confessions of a Heretic’ Series

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The insipid chorus of “watch what you say” is not civility. It is cowardice in a cardigan—a velvet chokehold throttling reason at the altar of weaponised fragility. We have mistaken offence for injustice, tantrum for argument, and paralysis for progress. The result is a cultural auto-da-fé, where truth is burned as an offering to the most performative victim.

My skirmish with this ideological haemophilia began at a Canadian university, where I now enjoy the dubious distinction of being suspended, without charge, without legitimate hearing, without shame, for eighteen months. The only artefact of “due process” is a store-bought investigator’s hall-of-mirrors report: barren of evidence, stitched with redactions and hearsay, and delivered with the ponderous tone of bureaucratic theatre. Not a single official has spoken to me. Not one has dared. I have been cast out, not for what I did, but for refusing to genuflect before the altar of fashionable hysteria.

The institution, in slavish prostration to two shrieking zealots, has squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, not to investigate, but to incinerate the truth.

Their pursuit of me resembles nothing so much as a medieval pilgrim chasing a heretic across a scorched wasteland: eyes glazed, lips cracked, brain pickled in dogma, hellbent on ritual obliteration.

I have been screamed at, institutionally shunned, and gagged. Even the President of Guelph, René Van Acker—whose moral compass appears to have been smelted down for scrap—joined the farce.

When a local rabbi, playing Diogenes with his lantern aloft, dared to wander the corrupted halls of Guelph in search of an honest answer, he asked, with naïve sincerity, “What’s happening with Finlayson?”

President René Van Acker, eager, unbothered, and prematurely triumphant, didn’t miss a beat. He smirked and declared, “Finlayson better start looking for a new job.”

This, mind you, was months before their procedural guillotine had even been hoisted, let alone dropped. And when this remark was later dragged into the light, much to CUPE’s dismay, as it scurried for another rug to sweep truth beneath—Van Acker pulled a well-worn page from the coward’s playbook: “I didn’t say that.”

When the top brass starts fibbing like guilty altar boys with wine on their breath and incense in their pockets, it’s not mere institutional decay—it’s dry rot in the cathedral rafters.

And yes, perhaps invoking a Catholic metaphor while citing a rabbi isn’t strictly kosher. Still, my rabbi friend is a prince among men and, unlike Guelph’s clerical class of administrators, he has the moral clarity to sniff out heresy when he sees it.

Administrators replicate the methodology of their censorious allies: proclaim guilt, manufacture evidence, and then shove their fingers in their ears and say, “We will never respond to you.”

Staff are instructed to forward my emails to a ghost in Human Resources. No answers. Just silence. Their silence is not professionalism. It is complicity.

And my heresy? What was my unpardonable sin? I said I stood with Israel. I called Hamas what they are: Nazis. Not a religion. Not an ethnicity. A gang of blood-soaked fanatics who murder civilians, drag gay men through streets, and dream of a caliphate run by 7th-century barbarism.

For this, a colleague, now under police investigation for hate propaganda, collapsed into a conniption that would make a teething infant look like Epictetus. He didn’t engage. He wailed.

And in the modern university, a well-aimed sob now outweighs centuries of moral reasoning—the fruit of our deep intellectual roots, defending down into the rich, loamy soil of the Enlightenment and nourished by the glory of Western civilisation. A civilisation that, for all its failings, remains a glittering gem in the dross of historical authoritarianism and tyranny.

That was enough to exile me. Not for hate speech. Not for incivility. But for violating the tissue-thin veneer of someone’s ideological comfort. I was banned, gagged, and—absurdly—threatened with arrest for texting a student who had publicly defamed me with a lie. The liars were never punished. They were protected. Why? Because they were attacking a heretic.

The vice-provost called my words “disgusting.”

But no—what’s disgusting is a university that cowers before bigots while trampling the innocent. What’s disgusting is spending taxpayer money not on an inquiry but on suppression.

This isn’t discipline. It’s sacrilege against the first commandment of any free society: the right to speak the bloody truth.

And speak I did—clearly, factually, and with unflinching moral precision: Hamas is a fascist death cult. I would say it again—before the howling mobs, the mewling equivocators, and the Guelph-Humber brass cowering behind lawyers like children clutching security blankets. Let them tremble—I do not.

However, the university, like many of its peers, decided that appeasing two partisan hysterics mattered more than upholding academic freedom or reason.

Let us be clear: free speech was not forged to protect platitudes or lullabies. It was created precisely for the dissenter, the heretic, the offensive truth. That’s why John Stuart Mill insisted that unpopular opinions must not just be tolerated, but aired—because in the wreckage of a bad idea may lie the one truth we all missed.

But today, truth kneels before tantrum. The Enlightenment has been mugged by DEI clerics and HR inquisitors who couldn’t spot a syllogism if it moonwalked into their equity seminar. We are not confronting sensitivity. We are capitulating to tyranny—in slippers.

This case isn’t about me. It’s a canary in the coal mine for every Canadian academic and non academic zwho still believes in open discourse. Universities—those supposed citadels of critical thought—have become playpens for pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats in whom cowardice masquerades as virtue.

Free speech is not a trinket of the West—it is its spine. From the parrhesia of ancient Athens, where citizens could speak truth to power without fear, to the cobblestones of Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, where dissent once rang like church bells, free expression has allowed democracies to survive their contradictions.

And now, the same institutions built on that freedom are torching it at the altar of feelings.

Orwell’s warning was not metaphor: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” We are drifting. And it is not the liars who are being punished—it is the truth-tellers.

I condemned a terrorist group. I defended a democracy. And for that, I am banished. Meanwhile, my colleagues declare the October 7 massacre “deserved,” and others call Jews “subhuman” without the slightest murmur of institutional censure.

The rules are not unclear. They are rigged.

And if I wish to criticise Islam—I will. Why has this volitional religion, with its well-documented extremism and history of conquest, been granted immunity from scrutiny? Why must we all pretend it’s the global religion of love, joy, and peace? It is not.

You may mock Christ, ridicule Vishnu, or spit on the Torah—but dare question Islam, and the bureaucracies quake. Why? Because civility has been weaponised. The less violent a group’s reaction to an offence, the less power they wield.

We have created an inverse moral economy, where rage buys silence.

A free society cannot peg its rights to the decibel level of the outraged.

My colleague’s eruption was not a rebuttal. It was a tantrum. He didn’t counter my words, claiming his identity made his offence sacred. And the university agreed. Not because they believed him, but because they were afraid of him.

This is the new catechism: the louder the wail, the holier the cause. We are not upholding justice—we are trading it for emotional extortion.

This is not education. This is not virtue. This is not Canada.

And so I end where I must:

I will not shut up. I will not apologise.

Your offence is your weakness—it is not sacred.

Your entitled expectation of my submission is a threat to my liberty.

You may speak—but do not presume to bully me with the volume dial. This is Canada, not the Papal See of Perpetual Victimhood. I stand with Israel. I stand with the Jews. Crawl back to your grievance grotto and stop pestering those who still believe in liberty.

Our timidity is not virtue—it is the muffled applause of self-imposed censorship. Discretion may be the better part of valour, but when it means gagging oneself to avoid offence, it ceases to be caution and becomes complicity. Let’s be honest: what we call “discretion” is often just cowardice, rebranded for polite society. And it is not a detour—it’s the on-ramp to tyranny.

Next week: The danger of the modern human rights clergy and Carney’s Bill C-63. Week three: Jihad, my ass! This is Canada. Yes, we will talk about Islam.

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