Religion is a Mental Illness

A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto.

A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story o

https://www.thefp.com/

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States. 

“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.” 

It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity. 

Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.” 

It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.

“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered. 

Citing Canada’s public schools, tax regime, and socialized healthcare system, and no doubt drawing on his own experience teaching in a predominantly black high school in Buffalo, New York, he said: “We’re a far more just society.”

There was a momentary silence. None of the other attendees waded in. 

Then Thompson, who is black, laced into Bilkszto, who is white.

“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this Covid disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us. . . you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now,” she said.

Bilkszto shut up.

That seemed like the end of that. 

In fact, it was just the beginning of Bilkszto’s harrowing, two-year descent into an ordeal of public shaming and isolation that ended only when he took his life last month.

“He was distraught,” Michael Teper, a Toronto accountant and friend of Bilkszto, told The Free Press.

“It was not only his job that was taken away from him, but his reputation, because those very people were assassinating his character. They claimed he was a white supremacist, that he was a racist. They knew nothing about him. They knew nothing about what he stood for or what he believed. All they know about is what they believe.”

As the lawsuit that Richard Bilkszto filed against the Toronto District School Board, or TDSB, later noted, he was a 24-year veteran of Toronto public schools. He had been a teacher, a vice principal, and a principal. He was respected by his colleagues.

“Richard Bilkszto is an experienced, effective, and highly accomplished educational leader,” the Toronto District School Board’s supervisory officer, Karen Falconer, said in a 2015 appraisal of his work. 

When Bilkszto announced his retirement in January 2019, Falconer said: “You have proven your excellence in equity, instruction, entrepreneurship, student engagement.” She called Bilkszto a “leader amongst leaders.”

Curtis Ennis, who was then a regional manager in the Ministry of Education, praised Bilkszto’s “brilliant service.”

Robert McManus, 60, a retired teacher who had been friends with Bilkszto since they’d met at Boy Scouts camp at age 11, said of Bilkszto: “He really listened. He really cared. If you had a problem, he was going to do his very best to help you. Obviously, these qualities went on to make him an amazing educator.”

After retiring, Bilkszto stayed on as a substitute principal, but he was eager to start thinking about the next phase of his life. He wanted to travel. 

Then, in late August 2020, Superintendent Leila Girdhar-Hill reached out to Bilkszto. The district desperately needed a principal to run Burnhamthorpe.

Bilkszto said he’d love to do it, but he was tied up until late September. 

“Later that evening,” according to the lawsuit, “Girdhar-Hill called Bilkszto to inform him that she had spoken with Executive Superintendent Uton Robinson. . . and they had both agreed Bilkszto was the right candidate for this position, given his unique qualifications [and] extensive experience in the Adult Education field.”

On September 21, Bilkszto started at Burnhamthorpe.

For the first several months everything went well, despite the pandemic and the lockdowns. 

On April 25, 2021, Falconer, now interim Director of Education, said to Bilkszto, “How long are you saving us at Burnhamthorpe? It is such a relief to know you are there.”

Two days later, on April 27, 2021, Leila Girdhar-Hill, the superintendent, informed Bilkszto that Dan MacLean, the TDSB trustee for Burnhamthorpe, was “very impressed” with Bilkzsto, according to the lawsuit, and asked if he could return for the next school year.

Bilkszto agreed.

As it turned out, on April 26, 2021, the day before Dan MacLean offered to extend Bilkszto’s contract by a year, Bilkszto had his confrontation on Zoom with Kike Ojo-Thompson, the founder and CEO of the KOJO Institute.

The Toronto District School Board had hired the KOJO Institute to provide four two-hour diversity, equity, and inclusion training sessions to its administrators—for nearly $61,000.

Thompson launched the KOJO Institute, a Toronto-based diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting shop, in 1998, and her clients include H&M, United Way, the Centers for Disease Control, and the University of Toronto, according to the firm’s website. 

KOJO is part of a rapidly ballooning, global DEI marketplace—with companies big and small increasingly worried they’ll be accused of systemic racism, and a slew of diversity consultants eager to charge handsome fees to teach these companies’ employees how to avoid being racist. In 2020, companies spent $7.5 billion on DEI-related efforts. By 2026, that figure is expected to rise to $15.4 billion—despite growing concerns about the efficacy of such efforts. 

KOJO’s first session with the TDSB took place April 19, 2021. Bilkszto attended that meeting, which was uneventful. (It’s unclear what attendees discussed at the first session.)

It was at the second session the following Monday, April 26, 2021, that Bilkszto suggested that maybe Canada was not “the bastion of white supremacy” Thompson had made it out to be—noting, for example, that public schools serving Canada’s poorest students are generally better funded than their equivalents in the United States.

“As white people, there’s a whole bunch going on that isn’t your personal experience,” Thompson said at the second session. “It will never be. You will never know it to be so. You will never know it to be so. So your job in this work, as white people, is to believe.”

No one in the Zoom meeting challenged any assumptions or thought to ask questions like: Who counts as white? Or black? Who should be believed? Who shouldn’t be? What about the many white and black people who don’t fit snugly into Thompson’s ideological compartments?

As she wrapped up the discussion, Thompson said: “I just want to thank everybody for a proper, thorough session today. We got into the weeds and got the weed whacker out apparently. It was hot today. It was good. It was really good.”

That day, Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, the executive superintendent of education—who is black—took to Twitter to show her support for Thompson. “When faced with resistance to addressing Anti-Black racism, we can’t remain silent as it reinforces harm to Black students and families,” Petrazzini wrote. “Thank you @KOJOInstitute for modeling the discomfort administrators may need to experience in order to disrupt ABR,” or anti-black racism. (She has since deleted the tweet.) 

The Petrazzini tweet “had a horrible effect on Richard,” according to Robert McManus, his longtime friend. It sent a message to the entire community of teachers and administrators, McManus said, that the school board approved of Bilkszto’s treatment—that he was guilty. (Petrazzini has since been promoted to director of education at another school district.)

It was at the third session on May 3, 2021—one week after Thompson’s public tongue-lashing of Bilkszto—that she decided to turn his “resistance” into a “teachable moment.”

“One of the ways that white supremacy is upheld, protected, reproduced, upkept, defended is through resistance,” Thompson explained—before laughing and going on to say: “I’m so lucky that we got perfect evidence, a wonderful example of resistance that you all got to bear witness to, so we’re going to talk about it, because, I mean, it doesn’t get better than this.” (Bilkszto’s attorney, Lisa Bildy, permitted The Free Press to listen to segments of the audio recordings of the training sessions.) 

Other attendees joined the pile on.

One woman, who Thompson calls “Lisa” on the recording, talked about white “discomfort” with open-ended discussions about race. 

Another woman, whose name is hard to make out on the recording, defended Thompson to the class while referring to Bilkszto as “the whiteness.” 

She said to Thompson: “I believe I heard you say—I’m a black woman, I’m telling you this—yet the whiteness said, ‘No, this is what I’m telling you,’ and that’s often the posture.’ They don’t want to hear what you’re saying. . . ”

No one came to Bilkszto’s defense.

“I think there was some back-channel texting while it was going on, where they acknowledged this was wrong,” Anthony Furey told me, alluding to other people in the DEI training session. Furey met Bilkszto while Furey ran in the recent Toronto mayoral race. “But the problem is nobody had the balls or leadership to stand up and say this is wrong.”

On May 4, 2021, the day after the third session, Bilkszto filed for sick leave. He missed the fourth and final session, the next Monday, and filed a complaint with school officials saying that he’d been harassed.

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board looked into the matter. In August 2021, the board released its findings, stating that Thompson’s behavior was “abusive” and amounted to “workplace harassment.” Bilkszto was awarded seven weeks of lost pay.

But by then, Bilkszto was tainted goods.

Mike Ramsay, a friend of Bilkszto, told us: “His contracts were freezing up—and not a word from his former supervisors and colleagues. While he said some people were nice to him, for many others, he was not politically popular to be seen or be around.”

Richard Bilkszto was, above all, an educator, his friends and colleagues said. He didn’t have a partner or children. But he cared deeply about his students, and he was worried about the impact of the new identity-focused politics on the classroom, even though he was gay and, in an interview with The Free Press a few months before his death, voiced concern about transgender students being bullied.

“To me, being gay is a part of me,” Bilkszto said in the interview. “It’s not my identity. It’s not something I choose to put out there all the time. As a matter of fact, if people were having a conversation about, you know, ‘I don’t think there should be gay marriage,’ I’m not even offended by that if people are making rational arguments—as long as they’re not being homophobic.”

He added: “It’s about the whole cancelling and not allowing for free speech, free debate, and all those types of things. I’m a big free speech proponent.” Bilkszto said he thought Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who built his online following by spotlighting the excesses of wokeness, was spot on.

In his interview with The Free Press, Bilkszto sounded exasperated with the Toronto District School Board, saying that if he had kids he wouldn’t send them to the public schools. “It’s nothing about competence anymore,” he said. “It’s about your allegiance to the ideology.”

In April, Bilkszto sued the Toronto District School Board, citing Thompson’s “defamatory statements” and the unwillingness of administrators and other higher-ups at the TDSB to stand up for him—even though they had previously showered him with praise.

“Bilkszto has suffered and will continue to suffer damage to his character and reputation both personally and professionally,” the lawsuit states. “As well, Bilkszto has been subjected to embarrassment, scandal, ridicule, contempt, and severe emotional distress.” 

The lawsuit offered the hope of redemption. But it apparently wasn’t enough.

On July 13, Bilkszto jumped from his 16th-floor apartment in Toronto, ending his life. He apparently left a note, but loved ones did not want to share its contents. He was 60. 

“How can you not be allowed to slightly disagree with something without them tearing you apart for it?” Jason Bilkszto, Richard’s nephew, said in an interview with The Free Press. He was having trouble holding back his tears. 

“I miss my uncle. I don’t have him to ask for advice or guidance anymore. I wasn’t done getting advice from him. I feel like that’s been stolen from me.”

The last time Jason saw his uncle was June 19. It was Richard’s birthday and Father’s Day weekend, and the whole family gathered at Richard’s 94-year-old mother’s house. Richard made lasagna and salad.

“He seemed okay,” Jason, a chef who runs his own catering business, said. “He didn’t seem too stressed out or anxious. I can’t really say we noticed anything in particular that raised any alarms or anything.”

Robert McManus last spoke to Bilkszto July 12—the day before he committed suicide. “It was absolutely clear he was not sleeping well as a result of all the stress,” McManus said. “He was a very optimistic person, so the vast majority of the time, when people would be speaking to him, he would be seen as doing well, but his friends knew that he struggled—he struggled with what had happened to him.”

McManus added: “Our last conversation ended with me inviting him over to my place for a dinner party on Saturday, and he said, ‘See you Saturday.’ ”

Jason Bilkszto recalled that, when his grandmother—Richard’s mother—heard about her son’s death, “it looked like someone had ripped her heart out.”

Jason said he thinks his uncle was worried about the stain on the family name. “Our last name is very unique and not common at all,” he said, “and everyone’s on social media these days. I do think that maybe he was worried about our name and it affecting the rest of the family, because it is so uncommon. That was probably weighing on him.”

The Free Press reached out to Kike Ojo-Thompson and several of her colleagues at the KOJO Institute. No one agreed to talk. When we visited the KOJO Institute’s office—in a sleek, two-story brick building—no one appeared to be there.

On July 27, Thompson released a statement on the KOJO Institute’s site saying: “This incident is being weaponized to discredit and suppress the work of everyone committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” She added that “[W]e will not be deterred from our work in building a better society for everyone.”

In the wake of Bilkszto’s death, Ari Goldkind, a Toronto attorney, said the DEI consultants—and all the businesses, nonprofits, and school districts that hire them—are now “on notice” that these training sessions “can have horrendous, real-world consequences.”

“There’s a real possibility here that, moving forward, the DEI training session becomes much more litigious, with attendees who feel put upon or hurt or maligned, dangerously maligned—meaning they’re ostracized or rendered unemployable—striking back in court,” Goldkind said. “That’s the lesson of this tragedy, that people are sick and tired of being isolated and cast out from polite society because they have the gall to ask a question or challenge the orthodoxy.”

It’s been two weeks since Bilkszto’s death, and his friends can’t believe he’s gone. Once upon a time, Robert McManus said, Bilkszto was the centrifugal force around which everyone in their circle revolved. He was the energetic one, the one who was always the most enthusiastic about whatever anyone else was up to.

And then he seemed lost, Michael Teper said. He’d gone to Mexico earlier this year to get away from the madness, but when he came back, Teper said, the madness was waiting for him.

McManus said: “It’s hard to imagine my life without him. I’m saddened that, in his moment of need, no one defended Richard.” Had it been someone else, McManus added, “he would never have sat silently by.”

"There’s a real possibility here that, moving forward, the DEI training session becomes much more litigious"

Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being "class enemies" were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, "students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents". Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution. The denunciation of prominent class enemies was often conducted in public squares and marked by large crowds of people who surrounded the kneeling victim, raised their fists, and shouted accusations of misdeeds.

“A word in the ear of the psychologists, assuming they are inclined to study ressentiment close up for once: this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today, so it flowers like it always has done, in secret, like a violet but with a different scent. And just as like always gives rise to like, it will come as no surprise to find attempts coming once more from these circles, as so often before to sanctify revenge with the term justice—as though justice were fundamentally simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged—and belatedly to legitimize with revenge emotional reactions in general, one and all.”

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality”

And finally. New Rule: If you're part of today's Woke Revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings.

Communists thought selfishness - selfishness - could be cast out of human nature. Russian revolutionaries spoke of the New Soviet Man who wasn't motivated by self-interest, but instead wanted to be part of a collective. No, turns out he wanted to be on a yacht in a Gucci tracksuit holding a vodka and a prostitute. Not standing in line all day for a potato.

The problem with Communism, and with some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it. That you can bend human nature by holding your breath. But that's the difference between reality and your mommy.

Lincoln once said that you can "repeal all past history, but you still cannot repeal human nature." But he's canceled now, so fuck him.

Yesterday I asked ChatGPT, are there any similarities between today's Woke Revolution and Chairman Mao's cultural revolution of the 1960s, and it wrote back, how long do you have?

Because again, in China, we saw how a revolutionary thought he could do a page one rewrite of humans. Mao ordered his citizens to throw off "the four olds": old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. So um, your whole life went in the garbage overnight, no biggie.

And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the "Red Guard" who went around the country putting dunce caps on people - yeah - who didn't take to being a new kind of mortal being. A lot of pointing and shaming went on. Oh, and about a million dead. And the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical, then apologize and thank the state for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are. And of course, submit to re-education. Or, as we call it here in America, freshman orientation.

Listen to this story. There's a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago named Jason Kilbourne whose crime was that on one of his exams, he used a hypothetical case where a black female worker sued her employer for race and gender discrimination, alleging that managers had called her two slur words. The type of real world case these students might one day confront, and knowing the extreme sensitivity of today's students, he didn't write the two taboo words on the test, just the first letter of each. He was teaching his students how to fight racism in the place where it matters most, the criminal justice system.

But because he merely alluded to those words - again in the service of a good cause - he was banned from campus, placed on indefinite leave, and made to wear the dunce cap. No, not really the dunce cap part. But our American version of that: eight weeks of sensitivity training. Weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer, and having to write five "self-reflection" papers. A grown ass man. A liberal law professor.

If you can't see the similarities between that and this, the person who needs re-education is you.

Yes, we do have our own Red Guard here but they do their rampaging on Twitter.

Here's a cute example from a couple of years ago. The banjo player from Mumford and Sons tweeted that he liked a book. A book that apparently had not been approved by the revolution. So of course, he had to delete the Tweet then take time away from the band - oh my God you mean this could have affected Mumford and Sons - and then the cringing apology: "I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed." Pain? From a book? Unless he hit the drummer over the head with it? What happened to “I can read whatever the fuck I want”? Don't worry, I'm a musician, it won't happen again.

There was once a very different musician named John Lennon who wrote a song called "Revolution," and people who didn't really listen to it thought it was a rah-rah call for revolution. No, it was the opposite. The lyrics are:

“You say you want a revolution. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao You ain't gonna make it with anybody anyhow."

There's a guy who understood how good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your Revolution is so awesome, and your generation is so mind-bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human. You're welcome.

With Communists, that human was no longer selfish. In America today, that human is no longer born male or female. And obesity is not something that affects health. You can be healthy at any size. Really, we voted on it.

A formerly serious magazine last year published with a straight face, an article called "Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense." Yes it does. Because again, we haven't reinvented homo sapiens since Crystal Pepsi came out.

I've spent three decades on TV mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory, and now I got to deal with people who say, you know what else is just a theory? Biology.

They will never be convinced that cancel culture exists

Let's not waste our breath

sarahhaider.substack.com|Sarah Haider

In some parts of the landscape, it seems we are still debating this question.

A few days ago, journalist Adam Davidson, asked on Twitter:

“Can one of you believers in cancel culture just write one piece that gives evidence and doesn't just speak to a feeling you have? Maybe some data that helps your readers know the size and scale of this problem? Also, some examples of people actually fired?”

It seems absurd to me that anyone could still deny the existence of the phenomenon - in fact, so absurd that I literally don’t believe it.

However, others are not as cynical as me, and supplied Mr. Davidson with countless stories - occasionally their own. One man said he was suspended from the British Labour Party for saying “only women experience menopause”. Multiple women claimed similar losses, firings and suspensions over gender issues.

Others shared the dataset by FIRE cataloging 426 cases in the recent past of scholars targeted for ideological reasons. They noted that the scholars were ten times more likely to be targeted by those on the left. Another user shared a catalog of events that bubbled up in public discourse - nearly 300 incidents.

Most significantly, some pointed out that for every case that makes the news, there are likely scores more that don’t. Most of us cannot afford to make a stink about a traumatic incident, we cope and try to move on as best we can. The incidents that do rise to public consciousness do so usually because the person targetted is already in the public eye - and privileged enough to have a stage.

I was unlucky enough to once debate Billy Bragg on BBC about this issue, and I learned very quickly that my carefully prepared arguments were less than worthless. No amount of reasoning, anecdotes, or even data was going to convince him. I began to see what I see clearly now: that they aren’t denying the existence of cancel culture because they don’t see it - they are denying it because they still want to keep this weapon and don’t want to feel like bad people for using it. It is easier to just pretend a harm isn’t happening than to try and justify it (but of course, when cornered by reality, they will try that too).

The arguments usually progress down the steps of clown-world politics.

First, they will deny. Then, they will minimize (either the relevance or impact or both). Finally, they will outright justify.

Just yesterday, Greg Lukianoff and Komi German of FIRE wrote a piece in the Daily Beast with evidence of the existence of this culture. “And despite the denialism surrounding its very existence, we will demonstrate through empirical data and polling that cancel culture is not only a real problem, it is one that continues to expand in scope and size.”

A worthy pursuit by two earnest and thoughtful people. Too bad it won’t work.

* * *

At this point, it is profoundly naive to imagine that evidence will result in anything but a shift in goalposts. Not because they are fundamentalists on the issue - but because they are anything but.

I have directly engaged with literal Islamic fundamentalists in my work for years. The fundamentalists might be unhinged, moralistic zealots - but they are fairly straightforward debaters. And that is because they are grounded in principle - they actually believe what they say. And over the years, I have successfully changed the minds of fervently religious people through debate. My most frustrating encounters were instead with very liberal believers.

These were the Western-born-and-raised individuals who grew up with a variant of the faith most believers would consider utter heresy. And yet, despite their liberal upbringings and carefree enjoyment of the freedoms of the secular West, they would sputter indignantly when asked to even acknowledge the religious abuse and persecution faced by those who did not have such privileges. At first I thought the problem was simple ignorance - they had difficulty accepting what they themselves had not experienced. But the mountains of data, polls, historical and judicial analysis I presented made no difference either - to them Islam would always be a good and tolerant religion, and Muslims beleaguered, but model, minorities.

The reason was simple: as members of a religious group which was often considered marginalized, they could benefit from victim status among the general population. Meanwhile, as beneficiaries of a uniquely liberal upbringing within Islam, they were spared from the worst elements of the practice and community. They had both the freedoms of the West, and freedom from the worst of Islam - while appropriating and minimizing the suffering of others. They could have their cake and eat it too.

I learned a valuable lesson in dealing with these types. When someone sincerely holds a position, they will debate in earnest. When someone holds a position because it is in their favor to hold it, they will not. You must respond to the self-serving man by taking away the benefit he derives from an act - by turning the incentives around. Then, the same selfishness that keeps him in will lead him out.

The “what cancel culture?” guys are not like the fundamentalists - they are not sincere doctrinaires, but the beneficiaries of a brutally unjust system. The merits of the position they hold are irrelevant.

I’ll go further. They know that cancel culture exists. They like it, and want to keep using it. The only way to get them to stop is to turn that weapon against them.

* * *

I’m sure I’ve lost at least half my readers there, who probably didn’t expect such a militant position from me.

But frankly, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of seeing good people destroyed by this madness, and of watching others cower in fear because of it.

It has been years and years of life-ruining mobbings wreaking havoc on our discourse. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship - which allows the most extreme to rule the day. Empowered in their role as the only actors who can openly advocate for their values, our culture appears to leap to their bidding. Meanwhile, the resentment of the disempowered grows. In the reprieve provided by the anonymity of the ballot box, they reveal their disgust at the ruling class and a rejection of their ideology. But the ruling class is incentivized to interpret this rejection in only one way: as a sign of hate and bigotry.

The denial of cancel culture is an attempt to maintain the semblance of victimhood, while behaving as a bully. This pretense of disempowerment is vital to their claims of moral authority - as I’ve noted before: wokeism (the religion of the elite) is a Will to Power, an anti-ideology. Their language and demands shift with the wind - what is woke one day will be contemptible bigotry the next, the only constant being the stupefying rate of change. The only thing that can arguably be called a “principle” is their approach to power. In their faith, power doesn’t belong to the people - it belongs to the powerless. And as it happens, the only legitimate arbiter of who is or isn’t powerless is the elite, woke class. As the self-defined electors and self-declared champions of the marginalized, they demand and then preside over the transfer of power, guiding it into place in a gesture we are assured is self-denying and altruistic.

But if it is the case that indeed the powerless are not so powerless, that they can strip “The Privileged” of their livelihoods for mere speech - then the moral justification underlying their ideology is exposed as plainly false.

Denial of cancel culture is not a matter of ignorance - it is a matter of political expediency.

* * *

Would you be incentivized to hold that fire was a bad thing if it had never burned you or anyone you knew - but disfigured those you happened to hate? What if you had the power to start these fires - but your enemies had comparatively little?

Maybe you enjoy the attacks or can justify them as worthwhile in service of some greater good, so you fan the flames. But you also don’t want to seem like the kind of person who would do such a horrible thing. So you pretend there is no harm done. And in the rare instances a blackened enemy corpse lands squarely in front of you and you can no longer deny its existence, it is too easy to simply shrug and say “well, what did she expect? She was playing with fire”.

The thing about empathy is that it is against our nature to apply it universally. It is a provincial emotion - one that grants grace to our friends and delivers fury to our enemies. The more humanistic emotion - compassion - is a difficult one to hold, and does not relay nearly the same kind of emotional satisfaction. So long as cancel culture strikes so unevenly, it will never go away. So long as the harms fall far more heavily on one side, it is in the interest of the other to continue weaponizing it.

The only way Good White Men like Mr. Davidson will recognize the harms of cancel culture is when it is them and their friends and loved ones, who suffer.

“But Sarah… Does this mean you are asking for more cancellations?”

This is indeed one of the conclusions that one can draw. But no, I don’t believe we must to stoop to cruelty to end it.

More importantly, I do not trust anyone who claims to be able to know when to put aside principle without losing their sense of right and wrong altogether. I cannot, now or ever, try to destroy an innocent person’s livelihood, nor will I advocate for others to do the same. This may be the doomed logic of the pacifist - and perhaps proof that I’m not cut out for cultural warrior status.

Nevertheless, a strategy that relies on the nobility of its enemy is not a strategy at all - it is a prayer.

And while it is dishonorable to cancel innocent bystanders of any political affiliation for any reason - what we can do is treat hypocrites with the same compassion and kindness they would mete out on others who find themselves on the wrong side of the mob.

When a canceller gets canceled, it is fairly common to see anti-woke liberals defend them - as if on a mission to prove their own magnanimity and integrity. But this is a misguided tact, and in practice more self-serving than morally justified.

There must be a cost to injustice - otherwise there is no hope of change.

Meanwhile, those of us who oppose the changes demanded by the woke must not waste our efforts on lost causes - like convincing disingenuous actors of the existence of the damage. Instead, our focus should be aimed at more fruitful pursuits, like understanding the roots of the decay, investigating why we are shifting into a culture of honor vs. a culture of dignity, why the administrative state and the environment of institutions are amenable to the demands of the woke, how changes brought upon by technology shift incentives, and most importantly what interventions can meaningfully address the problem.

• FIRE: The Targeting of Scholars for Ideological Reasons from 2015 to Present
• Twitter thread of over 400 cancelations

There’s something I can respect about a fundamentalist or an extremist. They’re all-in. They know what they believe, they know why they believe it, and they’ll tell you to your face. They’re honest about the fact that I, as a non-believer, deserve to burn in hell. I can actually work with this, because I know where I stand.

Modern moderate believers are frustrating because they’re trying to straddle the divide between their primitive superstitious beliefs and a modern, secular, diverse society. They’ll vacillate, equivocate, try to make it my fault their religion says I should burn in hell, and so on.

“If the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible’s always right about every subject...”

-- Pastor Steven Anderson

Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.

    1. That he had returned the kettle undamaged     2. That it was already damaged when he borrowed it     3. That he had never borrowed it in the first place

Thought Reform 101

The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation.

Reason.com

At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as "mandatory" for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with "a person of color for a day." In Swarthmore College's dormitories, in the fall of 1998, first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built into freshman orientation and residential programming. These exercises have become so commonplace that most students do not even think of the issues of privacy, rights, and dignity involved.

A central goal of these programs is to uproot "internalized oppression," a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities. Like the Leninists' notion of "false consciousness," from which it ultimately is derived, it identifies as a major barrier to progressive change the fact that the victims of oppression have internalized the very values and ways of thinking by which society oppresses them. What could workers possibly know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers truly should want? What could students possibly know, compared to those creating programs for offices of student life and residence, about what students truly should feel? Any desire for assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white America's strategy for racial hegemony.

In 1991 and 1992 both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal published surveys of freshman orientations. The Times observed that "orientation has evolved into an intense …initiation" that involves "delicate subjects like…date rape [and] race relations, and how freshmen, some from small towns and tiny high schools, are supposed to deal with them." In recent years, public ridicule of "political correctness" has made academic administrators more circumspect about speaking their true minds, so one should listen carefully to the claims made for these programs before colleges began to spin their politically correct agendas.

[..]

The darkest nightmare of the literature on power is George Orwell's 1984, where there is not even an interior space of privacy and self. Winston Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic of the argument that everything is political, and he can only dream of "a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."

Orwell did not know that as he wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university students to "thought reform," known also as "re-education," that was not complete until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as "progressive" in a manner satisfactory to their trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in academic "sensitivity training," a white student in his third day of a "facilitated" retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his college and hometown identified, confesses his family's inertial Southern racism and, catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students who will see this film on their own campuses), "It's a tough choice, choosing what's right and choosing your family."

[..]

The goal of such training, according to Amirall-Padamsee, is "to produce graduates who are individuals committed to educational and social justice, and not just a tolerance of, but a validating of difference." To accomplish that she says, "we need to define and implement ways to translate education to behavioral change." In addition, she boasts, she has access to federal work-study funds, and she uses that position--and her capacity to dismiss people-- "to try to make a positive change in the way that the student is thinking."

Tovar, formerly of Oklahoma State University and now at the University of Oklahoma, declares in an interview at the conference that "at OSU we have all kinds of sensitivity training." She describes an incident involving fraternity brothers who had been disrespectful of Native American culture: They ended up "incredibly emotional….These fraternity kids broke down." OSU also has mandatory multicultural freshman orientation sessions.

Bynes, also the co-chairman of the Prejudice Reduction Committee at Adelphi University, says the committee's emphasis is on training individuals how to interact "with a diverse student body," with "separate training for students…[and] special sessions on student leadership training." This "cultural and racial awareness training would benefit all members of the Adelphi community, both in their university and personal lives." The committee would get people to talk about "`what I like about being so-and-so,' `what I dislike about being so-and-so,' and `the first time I encountered prejudice,'" all exercises that the facilitators had been shown and had experienced in their own "training" by the Justice Department.

Bynes is a kind, accomplished, candid, and well-meaning woman. As she explains, "White people must have…sensitivity training…so that they can become aware of white privilege." Mandatory sensitivity training ideally should include both students and faculty, but "there are things that we can't dictate to the faculty because of the fact that they have a union."

There are painful ironies in these attempts at thought reform. Individual identity lies at the heart of both dignity and the flourishing of an ethnically heterogeneous society. Black students on American campuses rightly decry any tendency of university police to stop students based on race. Their objections are not statistical but moral: One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by "diversity educators."

From the Inquisition to the political use of Soviet psychiatry, history has taught us to recoil morally from the violation of the ultimate refuges of self-consciousness, conscience, and private beliefs. The song of the "peat bog soldiers," sent by the Nazis to work until they died, was "Die Gedanken sind frei," "Thoughts Are Free," for that truly is the final atom of human liberty. No decent society or person should pursue another human being there. Our colleges and universities do so routinely.

The desire to "train" individuals on issues of race and diversity has spawned a new industry of moral re-education. Colleges and universities have been hiring diversity "trainers" or "facilitators" for 15 years, and the most famous of them can command $35,000 for "cultural audits," $5,000 for sensitivity workshop training, and a sliding scale of honoraria, some for not less than $3,000 per hour, for lectures.

This growing industry has its mountebanks, its careerists, its well-meaning zealots, and its sadists. The categories often blur. Three of the most celebrated facilitators at the moment are Edwin J. Nichols, of Nichols and Associates in Washington, D.C.; Hugh Vasquez, of the Todos Institute in Oakland, California; and Jane Elliott, the Torquemada of thought reform. To examine their work is to see into the heart of American re-education.

Nichols first came to the attention of critics of intrusive political correctness in 1990, when he led an infamous "racial sensitivity" session at the University College of the University of Cincinnati. According to witnesses, his exercise culminated in the humiliation of a blond, blue-eyed, young female professor, whom he ridiculed as a "perfect" member of "the privileged white elite" who not only would win "a beauty contest" but even "wore her string of pearls." The woman, according to these accounts, sat and sobbed. These contemporaneous revelations did not harm Nichols' career.

According to the curriculum vitae sent by his firm, Nichols studied at Eberhardt-Karls Universität in Tubingen, Germany, and at Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, "where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and Psychiatry, cum laude" (a rare degree). In some publicity material, he states that he founded a school of child psychology in Africa; at other times, he modestly withholds that accomplishment.

Nichols' schedule of fees is almost as impressive as his schedule of thought reform. He charges $3,500 for a three-hour "Basic Cultural Awareness Seminar," plus travel and per diem. For a plain old "Workshop," he gets $4,000-$5,000 plus expenses. This makes his staple offering--a "Full Day Session (Awareness Seminar and Workshop)"--a bargain at $5,000 plus expenses. For a "Cultural Audit," he gets $20,000-$35,000 (he recently did one of these for the University of Michigan School of Medicine). The Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor paid him $15,000 for diversity training; the Environmental Protection Agency got him cheaply at $12,000.

Business is booming. Nichols has brought awareness to the employees of six cabinet departments, three branches of the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI; the Goddard Space Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA; the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration. He has enlightened city and county governments, whole school systems, various state government departments, labor unions, several prestigious law firms, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore. His clients include "Fortune 500 Corporations, foreign governments, parastatals, associations, health and mental health systems," and he has been a consultant to offices of "The British Commonwealth of Nations" and "organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Latin America…Singapore, Malaysia, and China." He has a very long list of academic clients, and he was a centerpiece of Johns Hopkins' 1999 freshman orientation.

What does Nichols believe? He believes that culture is genetically determined, and that blacks, Hispanics, and descendants of non-Jewish Middle-Eastern tribes place their "highest value" on "interpersonal relationships." In Africa, women are the equal of men. Whites were altered permanently by the Ice Age. They value objects highly, not people. That is why white men commit suicide so frequently when they are downsized.

Nichols calls his science of value systems "axiology," and he believes that if managers and administrators understand these cultural differences, they can manage more effectively, understanding why, according to him, blacks attach no importance to being on time, while whites are compulsive about it. Whites are logical; blacks are intuitive and empathetic. Whites are frigid; blacks are warm and spontaneous. Whites are relentlessly acquisitive; nonwhites are in harmony with nature. White engineers, for example, care about their part of something; Asian engineers, managers should know, care about the whole. Whites are linear; nonwhites have a spiral conception of time. Nichols has a handout that he frequently uses. Whites, it explains, "know through counting and measuring"; Native Americans learn through "oneness"; Hispanics and Arabs "know through symbolic and imagery [sic]"; Asians "know through striving toward the transcendence [sic]." Asking nonwhites to act white in the workplace is fatal to organizational harmony. Understanding cultural axiology is essential to management for the 21st century. Now, reread his list of clients.

[..]

In short, this is America, and there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort. Culture, society, and politics all are static. "White privilege" controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means that arise from these to render "people of color" psychologically impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume your guilt.

There is no redemption except guilt, but there is a political moral. After "teaching" a "bluey" to submit totally to her authority, she asks if that was a good lesson. The workshop thinks it was. No, she says with venom, submission to tyranny is a terrible lesson, but "what I just did to him today Newt Gingrich is doing to you every day…and you are submitting to that, submitting to oppression."

The facilitators' guide and publicity for Blue Eyed states things honestly: Elliott "does not intellectualize highly emotionally charged or challenging topics…she uses participants' own emotions to make them feel discomfort, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation." Facilitators are urged to use the raw emotions of Blue Eyed (blueys do cry a lot) to tap the reactions of the viewers. They should not expect black participants to "bleed on the floor for whites," but they should get whites to "stretch" and "take risks." The facilitators should be prepared for very strong and painful emotions and memories from the participants. The ultimate goal of the film: "It is not enough for white people to stop abusing people of color. All U.S. people need a personal vision for ending racism and other oppressive ideologies within themselves."

Elliott does mean everyone. In 1996, she told her audience at Kansas State University that all whites are racists, whatever they believe about themselves: "If you want to see another racist, turn to the person on your right. Now look at the person on your left." She also believes that blacks were in America 600 years before whites. She told the students at Kansas State that if they were angry at her, they should write letters, but that they must do so without paper, alphabet, or numbers, all of which were invented by people of color. Whites, in Elliott's view, did have a certain creativity. Betraying a breathtaking ignorance of world history, she told the Australian Internet magazine Webfronds in 1998 that "white people invented racism." Other than that, however, whites were quite parasitic.

"You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with," she told the magazine. "You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with. We stole those ideas from other people. If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color."

Jane Elliott has lived through revolutionary cultural changes without taking note of any. She teaches only helplessness and despair to blacks and only blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites. She addresses no issue with intellectual seriousness or purpose. She also is the reigning star in thought reform these days. On May 7, 1999, CBS News ran a feature on her that declared: "For over 30 years, Jane Elliott has waged a one-woman campaign against racism in America." CBS might want to rethink the notion of "racism."

Even traditionalist campuses now permit the ideologues in their offices of student life to pursue individuals into the last inner refuge of free men and women and to turn students over to trainers who want them to change "within themselves." This is a return of in loco parentis, with a power unimagined in prior ages by the poor souls who only tried to keep men and women from sleeping with each other overnight. It is the university standing not simply in the place of parents but in the place of private conscience, identity, and belief.

From the evidence, most students tune it out, just as most students at most times generally have tuned out abuses of power and diminutions of liberty. One should not take heart from that. Where students react, it is generally with an anger that, ironically and sadly, exacerbates the balkanization of our universities. The more social work we bring to our colleges and universities, the more segregated they become, and in the classifieds of The Chronicle of Higher Education during the last few years, colleges and universities by the hundreds have advertised for individuals to oversee "diversity education," "diversity training," and "sensitivity training."

Orwell may have been profoundly wrong about the totalitarian effects of high technology, but he understood full well how the authoritarians of this century had moved from the desire for outer control to the desire for inner control. He understood that the new age sought to overcome what, in Julia's terms, was the ultimate source of freedom for human beings: "They can't get inside you." Our colleges and universities hire trainers to "get inside" American students.

Thought reform is making its way inexorably to an office near you. If we let it occur at our universities and accept it passively in our own domains, then a people who defeated totalitarians abroad will surrender their dignity, privacy, and conscience to the totalitarians within.

[For ten years, Chairman Mao's followers burned books, tore down statues and murdered millions loyal to the 'Four Olds' — old ideas, culture, customs and habits]

[Pictured: Red Guards reading Mao's Little Red Book in Beijing, 1966]

The Hundred Flowers Campaign, also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement [..] was a period from 1956 to 1957 in the People's Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged citizens to express openly their opinions of the communist regime. Following the failure of the campaign, CPC Chairman Mao Zedong conducted an ideological crack down on those who criticized the regime, which continued through 1959. Observers differ as to whether Mao was genuinely surprised by the extent and seriousness of the criticism, or whether The Hundred Flowers Campaign was in fact a premeditated effort to identify, persecute, and silence critics of the regime.

Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom

Some fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies.

www.theatlantic.com|John McWhorter

I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I'm now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.

The majority of my fellow instructors and staff constantly self-censor themselves in fear of being fired for expressing the “wrong opinions.” It’s gotten to the point where many are too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure … They are supporters of free speech, scientific data, and healthy debate, but they are too fearful today to publicly declare such support. However, they’ll tell it to a sympathetic ear in the back corner booth of a quiet bar after two or three pints. These ideas have been reduced to lurking in the shadows now.

A struggle session was a form of public humiliation and torture that was used by the Communist Party of China (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly years immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of a struggle session was to shape public opinion and humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the Two Minutes Hate is the daily, public period during which members of the Outer Party of Oceania must watch a film depicting the enemies of the state, specifically Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers, to openly and loudly express hatred for them. The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatreds towards politically expedient enemies: Goldstein and the enemy superstate of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's government of Oceania, and towards non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent, subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.

A struggle session was a form of public humiliation and torture that was used by the Communist Party of China (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly years immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of a struggle session was to shape public opinion and humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.

In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but they were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was well-known.