Part III—I am Being Pushed toward the Sharp Revolutionary Blades of Cancel Culture
Part 1 and 2 come before and for some reason don't use Roman numerals.
But Part III still Includes a non-hit song (button above), "Stand My Ground." Nobody likes my music, but I do :)
In two weeks, I will have been suspended for seven months with no ability to make a defence to the accusation that because I said I stood with Israel and that Hamas were Nazis, I was “inciting violence and a violent danger to students whereby I should never be allowed to teach again.”
Don't torture yourself if you are looking for a logical connection between those two statements. It is similar to saying, “I like chocolate pudding, so the lawn needs to be mowed.”
Now that I've addressed the niceties, I hope you had a lovely week. Mine did not quite climb up to “lovely.”
I contacted a staff employee at my university, and I said, “You have been circulating a story that I assaulted a student in a classroom where you claim I was escorted away by police, as well as other false stories. Please stop. They are hurtful.”
This employee didn’t take it well—she contacted someone who contacted someone, which led to someone sending a howling letter my way, telling me that if I contacted any more employees, I would be arrested by the Toronto Police for Criminal Harassment.
That’s like the kid who feels cold and pushes the thermometer to 32 C. I used to be the most popular professor, with 13 years of writing, extra class sessions, and late-night student anxiety. Now, I am a pariah, stuck at home and being threatened by the head parking and security goon. I have fallen far, but it was never Harvard to begin with.
The irony is quite rich: I am banned (unlawfully) from communicating with tens of thousands of past, present, and future staff, students, and employees. Thus, they believe I am not allowed to talk to my neighbour. If my daughter thought about going to the University of Guelph-Humber—which would happen right after my body cooled—I would not be able to speak to her.
But when I ask the University to stop their professors, students and staff from spreading stories that have destroyed my reputation - which is the most extreme form of harassment - I get a howling letter from some petty tyrant I have never heard of.
Yes, I think you are in a career-free fall when you go from “highly respected,” working all summer (unpaid) preparing a customized textbook for one course, only to be suspended and banished, courses reassigned, and have faculty and staff telling students that you assaulted a student in a fictional class and that you and Osama Bin Laden (kidding, he’s dead) are two of the greatest threats to mankind (humankind, sorry Justin).
But these highly ethical faculty may have ended their announcement of my pseudo-crime with, “That’s what I heard anyway.” They might say that defuses the insane allegation; I say it lit the fuse of gossip.
The head of parking at Humber College—who seems extremely unhinged and thinks they are in charge of all sessional professors on University of Guelph contracts—threatens to call the police if I contact any employee.
Why?
Because one radical Palestinian activist and fierce anti-semite, a Svengali for students, someone who wants to mobilise a boycott of Starbucks and posts how-to manuals for faculty to walk off the job, someone who teaches one course a year (I teach 17) instantly wins the hearts and signatures of senior administration when I dare say those damming words.
I stand with Israel, and if you stand with Hamas, you stand with Nazis.
Oops, I said it again: I am such a slow learner.
A smarter person would have ignored the Public Safety/Parking Officer/Head Security Guard’s vitriol, lowered the temperature, and not sent a return letter offering to pay for her Uber if she wanted to report my crimes in person.
Sorry, I took option two; it’s a bit too late in the game to try and start playing nice. It’s like you are covered with mud from a filthy rugby pitch, and you start worrying about the one square inch of cleanness on your rugby jersey. And they were never nice; they heard from a radical anti-semite professor; he scared them, he frightened them to the point where the AVP was shaking and angry as he handed me a suspension letter for an offending post that he, probably, quite honestly, said he hadn’t read. This was minutes after my accusor blasted his tirade to his five adoring and fully woke senior administrators. The AVP was just scared by my accuser and reacted.
Today, I learned I could not defend myself to the external investigator the university hired with the mandate to finish the investigation by January 2023. This investigator will make a report, leave all accusers anonymous, and allow accusers outside my university to attack me, and I must be silent.
She will make a report on their words and decide my fate using her powerful balance of probabilities (evidence is so 80s!) powers. But even if she doesn’t recommend “discipline,” they can sack me anyway.
It reminds me of the Salem witch test; I think if they sank and drowned, they were innocent, but if they broke the surface, they should be drowned; they were witches. At least the Salem Witch interrogators didn’t rattle on about emotional safety.
I am not allowed to speak, and I cannot make a defence. They will judge me without allowing me to speak.
Those who say that by me calling Hamas Nazis, I was inciting violence against children will hog the spotlight because that’s what they feel - remember, dear readers, if you say I like the colour orange at my work and someone was bitten by a dachshund wearing a pumpkin costume in grade two, and they are triggered; you have done violence to them, and damn you for making them feel unsafe.
The logic fails me; it’s like someone running to the air raid shelter because you dropped a plate on the kitchen floor.
But remember, we must always be modern, and if there is a new idea, it must be right; unsafe now is not confined to the feeling that you had when you were leaving the Oxford Bar alone at 2:00 AM on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg in 1984 with $40 in your pocket, only one shoe; and though you felt a little better because you had just hurled into the bushes, five drunk males are now advancing to you and saying, “We’d like you to contribute to our charity.”
No, not that type of old-fashioned, crewneck, flight sunglasses-wearing old-school safety.
No, now unsafety is when you are exposed to ideas that push you to consider that you are not god and that others might look at your treasured ideological keepsakes and doilies as being mega ugly.
Owwww. Mommy.
Damn, those violent fascists that make you unsafe with their bruising words And if you are ever involved in a human rights situation, remember to say the word “safety” whenever you are lost for a reason, and you will hear, “winner, gan-yon (French for win)” - you have now won the right to be completely anonymous if you want to make accusations.
You said, “Unsafe”. May we fall on our knees before you.
As a wise friend told me in his speech on managing expectations, Human Rights Tribunals (HRTs) at Universities are not judicial or quasi-judicial. Alice had to go through them in Wonderland, but they were edited out of the final manuscript; HRTs can invent and ignore processes at any moment.
But what about free speech? I read the University of Guelph’s free speech policy; it reads like a tenth grader had done a nose dive into Chat GBT and caveated it with the old as long as it doesn’t offend anyone’s human rights, especially protected category-based feelings. It sounds about as reasonable as one of those scammy websites where you can sign up for $6.99 a month and cancel anytime as long as you don’t expect to be paid back when you cancel, and remember that you are in for the full year, no matter what.
Remember when you said, “It’s not fair” to your mother when you were six, and you were shit out of luck, dad wasn’t around, and there was no higher court?
Except this is work. Your mother probably didn’t’ hate you and hadn’t, at the moment of your birth (or the start of her investigation), planned on taking you out into the forest and leaving you with two Oreos and no water.
But in a human rights court at a university where policies say, “Under certain conditions, you can do otherwise”, but don’t list the conditions, it’s no different and worse than saying, “We can do what we want. Shut your face, or we will shut it for you or call the police.”
At least, that would be honest.
And then they have the lovely human rights follow-up. We don’t think you deserve discipline officially, but we didn’t like how you reacted to our six months of defamation and abuse, so we are firing you for that.
It’s like your boss has locked you in a room and brought in three goons to pound the crap out of you; they do; you are bleeding on the floor, your nose is broken, your leg is pointing in an odd direction, and in steps your boss.
She tells you you may call the university support line if you feel down. Her goons smashed your phone, and you’re not feeling too therapy-friendly, so you tell her to go to hell.
She is indignant. You can’t speak to me like that, so she fires you and then knees you in the head. Welcome to human rights tribunals run by colleges.
One might say, wouldn’t I do better if I was allowed to play a human rights slot machine, and if I won, I kept my job? Yes, and you’d probably get free drinks; if done correctly, the employees would be much more attractive than anyone in a human rights office.
But I am trying not to make this just about me. I’m a nobody. But funny enough, a redline is developing down the middle of my face. And I haven’t been out in the sun.
It says to the University of Guelph and Humber College - do you want to be the first University or College in the world to fire the person who said they stood with Israel based on the complaints and wacky speculative emotional rants of a Palestinian activist who has used his Fagan like charms to get his student posse to say, “We stand with Hamas, we stand with the Houthis, we call for the extermination of Israel?”
That is the red line. Putting someone through six months of hell, abuse, defamation, threats, having staff on the exact day he was suspended announce that he was going to be terminated no matter what and capitulating to the threats of the baying mob who say, “We stand with Hamas and the Houthis.”
(The maturity level in the picture below is not off the charts, but you can’t say Hamas to CHAT GPT)
Would it be irrational or unfair if, after that point, you were called the University or the College of Hamas-Houthis (I’m so sorry to shit on the Houthis, they kill lots of people too, so why do they always get second billing!).
But is this just about me? No.
What if you are at university and say, “You think that measuring tree ring data from ten thousand years ago in a frozen stump in Greenland is not as accurate as that digital thermometer you got from Costco, and thus you doubt that we are all going to die soon and this brings you howling accusations from the climate change entrepreneur’s sycophants who have been hired at your uni?
What if you fail to recite the benediction of the Church of Her Penis correctly?
What if you forget to put the ™ mark near the statement that “Islam is the Official Religion of Peace and Love” and that all the statistics on violence and terrorism are just statistical tail huggers and we are due for a long run of Anglican grannies setting off bombs and creating Anglican nations that have the death penalty for burning the church hymnal or becoming Episcopalian because the average age at your Anglican church was 82.
What if you admit at a staff meeting that you think Trudeau is a bit of twat, and the Sri Lankan lady sitting across from you who loves Trudeau because his daddy let her family into Canada in the madness of the Lankan civil war and she begins to cry? You hurt someone’s feelings, and if they are bursting with melanin, they can take you down, and God will help you. You disgusting, violent racist.
Human rights courts are ad hoc, Maoist cancers, but what about the entire hate “crime” thing?
I’m not talking about actual incitement to violence, like my case where I called a terrorist group Nazis just because they evolved out of a movement that started a SS regiment, the Free Arabian Legion and where the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Al-Banna had a major bromance with Hitler. That’s an obvious firing offence. Nor am I talking about being a death DJ who calls Hutus to murder Tutsis.
Yes, it makes perfect sense. But the entire idea of calling something a hate crime that does not incite violence but wounds egos is an invitation to tyranny.
Oh no, oh no, we will use AI. It will work. We can go online and parse the nasty hate comments that hurt and destroy feelings and separate them from the rest that just wound egos.
No, we can’t.
There are no boundary fences, and it’s pure hubris. It’s like running a ski resort surrounded by moats at the bottom of hills, and the moats are full of man-eating and somehow winter-friendly alligators.
No, we will make sure everyone stops before the moat. Nothing will go wrong. But no, this is not a ski resort. This is all digital. Speech can be controlled; those who set the boundaries would never move those boundaries up, squeeze just those people in; nothing would go wrong. This is Bill C-63; it is hubris; it is a marvellous and poisonous soup of actual hatred and real prejudice against those who don’t cave to political orthodoxies.
The dangers of human rights panels are not simply their mad, mad subjectivity, which is just tyranny without the Maoist jackets and the bad haircuts. The threat is not just those poor bastards who find themselves caught in a hall of mirrors full of petty tyrants who write new rules documents each day, posting them on the floor and who turn the lights on and off while telling them that it is their fault, as they can’t understand the rules. This hall of mirrors has no exit, the door is locked, and your union reps have been given a ring of keys to get you out. But they tried just one and then left to attend another Hamas rally followed by a retreat in Niagara Falls, where they stayed in $400-a-night hotels and dropped casual references to the failings of the bourgeois.
No, this effect is just for the unlucky few, but its true power is the fear it creates: the people who might have spoken up are now silenced.
I received a message from a Jewish professor. He/she (even I am afraid of what they could do to her/he/zee/hee/tweet):
“Paul, I would support you, but I can’t. I am afraid I don’t want what happened to you to happen to me. I need this job. I need to support my family.”
This is the power of hate legislation; it allows the narrative to be controlled in the workplace, schools, churches, and those significant, uncomfortable conversations you might wander into at a family reunion, a backyard BBQ, or a bank line.
The narrative doesn’t just have to be controlled by fear; money has its charms. Put the right people in charge, and the power of shaping a narrative is immense. And it’s not all digital. My friend told me of James Keegstra, a long-time high school teacher in Eckville, AB. People tended to stay local, and after years of preaching and teaching anti-semitic bile, he had graduated class after class of anti-semites; they were in the churches, they were whispering about those Jews, they were in the banks with the teller whispering about the Jews at the top controlling everything, the entire community had become shaped by one evil man.
Let’s not be naive and think that all cultural narratives develop organically. Nobody says we have a lot of money; let’s use our soft power there. Let’s ensure this person knows we have his back at that University. He can post anti-Semitic posts five or ten times a day. Let him know that no matter what happens, he is safe. We will talk with the Dean. Let her know that we have many students of our faith there.
We would hate to see what happened if they didn’t want to attend your undoubtedly high-quality post-secondary institution; we would hate that. People are reasonable; we don’t have to follow the money, and one or two organizations can’t move the massive boat called culture. But they can.
James Keesgstra did it without a smartphone, but never here in Canada.
This nice Canadian thing needs to stop; we need to be more Israeli, more kvetching and standing up for ourselves.
The idea that someone else will always stand up for you and they will grab the rudder of this massive boat called culture is just delusion, making love to cowardice and self-interest while standing next to a pegging belt called wishful thinking. Lack of self-awareness is a dangerous thing, and for the love of God, I wish people would get a little.
At least please tell yourself the next time you are crying at the end of Schindler’s List that when your colleague is being thrown to the alligators, and you don’t dare to say enough, enough, damnit - Enough! Please put away the tissue and admit the following:
If you were back with Schindler, you’d probably piss yourself and point at Schindler and then run down the street, squealing in terror as the fascists began opening cupboards in your workplace.
God Bless Israel.
Powerful indictment of your previous hallowed hall, sadly all “higher education” faucets have similarly destroyed their staffs’ careers and students’ opportunities. Even a casual search on the internet lists victim upon victim of an insidious pogrom against right thinking professionals.
Suggestion: Make lemonade!
Start a Substack channel for educational professions who have suffered the slings and arrows at their respective Universities of Hams and Asses.
I can see T-shirts and banners emblazoned with “Professors Emeritus of Jabberwocky U,” the proceeds of which could help defer the outrageous prices of really good vodkas or single malts.
It’s a huge market, go for it! Oh, the University’s crest… how about a Jabberwocky flipping off the hallowed halls.