I’m all for this sort of lawfare
I saw two encouraging signs today. The first is this story about a lawsuit against an “anti-racism” DEI trainer because of a suicide that occurred in Canada. Here’s the story in a nutshell:
Kike Ojo-Thompson, a Toronto-based diversity trainer and founder and CEO of the KOJO Institute, told a class of about 200 administrators that Canada is more racist than the United States, according to a lawsuit filed by Richard Bilkszto in April.
Richard Bilkszto, a progressive and principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Center, challenged Ojo-Thompson’s assumption by citing Canada’s publicly funded education system and socialized health care, according to the lawsuit and audio obtained by The Free Press. …
[Thompson replied,] “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 responded.
Bilkszto killed himself July 11. Several of his friends noted that he was not doing well and struggled after the public discussion with Ojo-Thompson because he felt his character was assassinated for being labeled a “white supremacist,” The Free Press reported.
Lawsuits could get them right in the pocketbook, which might be where it hurts.
Note the language in the article – Bilkszto “struggled” after the discussion. That struggle is of course the point, because these confrontations are less physically violent forms of leftist struggle sessions a la the Chinese Communists, a public shaming meant to tear a person down and replace his or her ideas with new ones conforming to the cult:
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.
The second piece of encouraging lawfare news is that some gender clinics are halting puberty blockers, hormones, and so-called “gender-affirming” (Orwell take note) surgeries on minors, for fear of the lawsuits that are just beginning:
There has been a wave of bans on gender-affirming care for minors in Republican-led states in recent years, but some states allowed those already receiving puberty blockers or hormone therapy to continue.
Two such states, Missouri and North Dakota, have halted children’s prescriptions because medical providers are wary of harsh liability provisions in those same laws.
The article doesn’t treat this as good news at all. But as a person who is against the medical transition of minors because it is not empirically supported and is often dangerous in its effects as well as spread by social contagion, I see it as good news.
There was a great piece in The Free Press a month or so ago that I don’t have time to find right now about the Bilkszto case and the author did a few interviews about it also. Her name is Rupa something if memory serves.
Employment discrimination law applied to private employers is generally inadvisable. What is advisable is law defining as tortious certain sorts of activity which occur in workplaces, which exploit the hold employers have over their charges, and which map to common crimes like harassment or extortion. Ideally, federal law would apply to multi-state employers and state law to any enterprise which employs people in a given state. This sort of thing should expose the outside contractor, the company employing the workers harassed, and the employees who arranged for the contractors’ appearance to civil liability.
==
Public employees should also have a cause of action for this sort of thing.
==
Note, however, that you should not hold outside parties responsible for someone’s defective interior architecture unless they’re bound by professional ethics in regard to that. Say, people in the mental health trade.
“the medical transition of minors “. Just out of curiosity, what are they transitioning too? It is impossible to change your sex.
“Kike Ojo-Thompson, a Toronto-based diversity trainer…”
When did this “XX-based” business become a thing? What was wrong with saying, for example, “a diversity trainer from Toronto”?
It is good news that conservatives are picking up on lawfare. But it requires conservative lawyers/barristers, and they are few and far between.
“Diversity trainer” is a slick coinage. Makes me think of someone with serious professional credentials who is engaged to help individuals reach new heights of strength, speed, grace and beauty.
Instead we get an overpaid self-appointed grievance-mongering harridan.
Struggle session and scapegoating leads to a suicide of the victim. In progressive Canada he was found guilty by Diversity and faced professional destruction no doubt. A progressive lynching.
What is the argument; blacks can’t be racist because they have no power? Oh, Canada.
I’m all for the lawfare too, but I wonder how far a lawsuit can go, based on Ojo-Thompson’s accusation that “you and your whiteness” caused Bilkszto’s suicide.
This data caught my eye:
__________________________
The global DEI market is estimated to be $7.5 billion in 2020, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. The U.S. market for DEI is estimated to be $4.3 Billion in 2022, and global DEI budgets are projected to reach $24.3 billion by 2030, according to Report Linker.
True believers purging fellow travelers, and vice versa? Victory to both sides.
Sgt. Joe,
“A Toronto-based diversity trainer” means her business office is located in Toronto. That does not mean she herself is from Toronto. She might live there, but she might actually be from, say, London, Ontario, aka the Serial Killer Capital of the World.
It seems that by killing himself, Richard Bilkszto handed Kike Ojo-Thompson a win.
So he took his own life because he couldn’t deal with harsh words from a stupid female woke black race hustler? Very sad.
Thinking back to my transformational days involved in est, Erhard Seminar Training.
est was one of the original Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT) which emerged in the 1970s. It was created by Werner Erhard. It was a very intense psychological experience, which many (such as John Denver) claimed inspired profound personal growth.
However, some attendees were not so enthusiastic. In fact some people went psychotic after the experience and, getting to my point, a few committed suicide.
Lawsuits were filed. As I recall, they were all settled out of court. (est had ferocious legal representation.)
Did est get away with it? Sorta. But it did lead to Erhard revamping the Training into a kinder, gentler, less lawsuit prone version called the Landmark Forum, with more psychological screening. This seems to have kept them out of trouble.
Perhaps we can predict that the anti-racist and trans movements may be forced to moderate, though not cease to exist, due to lawfare,
So he took his own life because he couldn’t deal with harsh words from a stupid female woke black race hustler? Very sad.
IrishOtter49:
Well, yes. I believe I’m with you.
I rather dislike the anti-racism folks, but if someone imputes that I am a white supremacist, or really any other smear, it’s on me if I kill myself.
Maybe lawfare in this case is good tactics, but in the long run it reinforces the woke “hate speech” strategy which works against conservatives and the Constitution.
huxley: I guess what I’m hearing in your comment and others –and that amazing projected revenue figure for this tripe– is that a lot of people want to be hurt.
Less callously, I would say a lot of people can’t easily find a way NOT to get hurt, when their all-wise, all-caring employer orders them down to the conference center for “training.”
…a lot of people want to be hurt.
Owen:
I’d agree that many of our countrypersons seem to have lost the old American moxie: “Oh yeah, sez who?”
Growing up, I hated the cruelty of children’s playgrounds, the taunting and the bullying, but it did toughen most kids up (while breaking a few badly). Now kids know all they have to do (and must) is go to an Appropriate Adult, who will make it all right.
Today’s kids miss a whole lot of growing up.
I take your point, though, that this is happening in workshops required by one’s corporate employers, and that is somewhat different.
I rather dislike the anti-racism folks, but if someone imputes that I am a white supremacist, or really any other smear, it’s on me if I kill myself.
No doubt he had some deeper issues to respond with a suicide, but from what I’ve read his contract was not renewed by the school board, and he might have seen himself as unemployable and his reputation ruined when the investigation he requested never happened. Not an easy position to find yourself in at age 60.
huxley says, “Today’s kids miss a whole lot of growing up.”
Some kids are fighting back, according to Robert Zimmerman: On September 22, 2023 hundreds of students attending high school in Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Valley School District walked out of classes in protest when the local school board refused to pass a new rule that would forbid boys from using the girls’ bathroom. The school board had voted against the rule earlier in the week. According to superintendent Dr Barbara Russell it rejected the rule because of its own “anti-discrimination code which states gender identity is a protected class.” . . . . The students in these high schools however did not agree, and made that disagreement quite clear in their protest. I strongly suspect that even when they return to class, there is going to be an organized effort to protect the girls from such perversion. . . .
Zimmerman notes that the walkout was organized by a boy: “I can imagine that these students will soon organize a patrol whereby a male student will always be stationed at the door to the girls’ bathroom, making sure only girls enter. I also expect that within the social community of the young at these schools, it is also going to be made very clear to every cross-dressing boy that if it is discovered he used the girl’s bathroom, he will pay for it. And if the queers complain, too bad. They have the right to make believe they are not what they are, but they have no right to force that perversion of reality on others.”
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/pushback-pennsylvania-hs-students-stage-walk-out-protesting-rule-allowing-boys-inside-girls-bathrooms/
Interestingly, the Perkiomen Valley School District (PVSD) is not located in the Pennsylvania backwoods but close to Philly in one of the wealthiest counties in the Commonwealth: Montgomery County lies west of Bucks County, and the two together used to be known as Bucks and Megabucks Counties. You can read about the PVSD here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkiomen_Valley_School_District
I am reminded of the quite by Lenin: ‘capitalists will sell Marxists the rope which Marxists will use to murder them.’
The DEI Black Marxist’s goals are the same; murder mayhem, and power.
Interesting to see bullying brought up, but one point was not made explicitly. A lot of this DEI/anti-racism is organized bullying. In some cases it may be “getting a bit of your own back”, but I’d guess in most the “crimes” they are getting even for are imaginary.
But then, are there any honest and accurate* accounts of school bullying? I can go by my memory, but I think that – despite being a certified nerd – I escaped the worst. And individual memory is, even when accurate, misleading, and not that often accurate.
*The two are not synonymous.
A related story: TED has stifled a talk by Coleman Hughes advocating “color-blind” policies after some TED staffers complained about it:
https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness
Hughes is black, incidentally, but apparently not the right kind of black.
Here is something off topic but should make your blood boil.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/09/biden-admin-finally-found-asylum-seekers-it-opposes/
If this family were not Caucasian they would not risk deportation.
Yep, Joke Bidet’s Amerika, where about 40% of the voters approve of him.
…told a class of about 200 administrators that Canada is more racist than the United States…
And nobody asked her to explain why the underground railway went north, not south?
well its whiter than this country, isn’t it
its certainly more foolish,
after some TED staffers complained about it:
==
An aspect of liberal social policy is promoting narcissism and megalomania among blacks. Probably pretty effective among the sort of black who lands a salaried position in the non-profit blob. It was actually a caucus of black staffers who complained. He offered to meet with them and they refused; beneath them, dontcha know. Indubitably, their noses are out of joint because they’ve concluded it’s disrespectful to evaluate them according to their performance.
Some academician needs to attack DEI at its core.
Consider the D: Diversity. Diversity of race and religion are harmful to the nation-state. See ‘Bowling Alone’ by sociologist Robert Putnam, whose research shows that diversity leads to low trust societies.
Consider E: Equity. The word has been co-opted to mean ‘equality of outcome’ rather than a Kantian notion of fairness for all.
Consider I: Inclusion. The single most powerful force that has led to the rise of the middle class is private property. Private property means the authority to exclude. This word ‘inclusion’ means absolutely nothing. Every corporation that preaches ‘inclusion’ must immediately dismantle their electronic security systems so that no person is denied access to their facilities so that they may be inclusive. Every man who demands ‘inclusion’ must let me boink their wife because otherwise they are being exclusive.
DEI is a pack of propaganda.
Erronius
not_a_lawyer @ 3:50 PM: “DEI is a pack of propaganda.” Yes. I am now reading Thomas Sowell’s excellent just-published “Social Justice Fallacies,” and every word is a gem. What I bring away from it, at a general level, is the importance of challenging the claims of DEI and doctrines like it. They operate by asserting power: saying in effect, “It is we, not you, who will tell you which words are magic –today, it’s “diversity, equity, inclusion” and increasingly “belonging,” while tomorrow, who knows? we’ll tell you” and saying also “it is we, not you, who will tell you what the content of those words may be– today, it’s ‘diversity’ = more black or brown people and fewer whites or Asians, ‘equity’ = give me more money and maybe I’ll tell you when it’s enough.” The whole point is NOT to define the words in a fixed or agreed way, it’s to come at you with the words and put you on your back foot, wondering what it’s about, wondering what you’ve done wrong.
It’s a power tactic. Nothing more. But “nothing more” is misleading: because DEI is more than enough to destroy one institution after another.