Views from the pyre
The following is an essay that I wrote in 2019-2020, but which I lacked the discipline to edit or the boldness to publish. It relates to my experience of ‘cancel culture’ during the 2019 Alberta election. It is presented here with some minor retrospective updates.
I share these writings now because, in two weeks, I will have an opportunity that few “cancelled” persons ever get: I will be putting my accusers on trial in what may be among the the longest, most costly, and most consequential media defamation cases in Canadian history.
~~~
If you had Googled me on the morning of March 18, 2019, you would have learned that I was a mother of two small children, a former senior advisor at the Canadian foreign ministry, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and a prominent candidate for public office. You would know that I had recently earned my second Master’s degree, graduating with distinction from Oxford University, and that I had spent most of my life working with refugees and asylum seekers who fled persecution under totalitarian regimes. On my social media feed, you would have seen videos of me conversing in Mandarin, discussing Tolstoy, and opining about importance of cultivating friendships with people who hold divergent political views.
The same Google search 24 hours later would have produced an entirely different picture: I was no longer a promising political candidate. Instead, I was being denounced in Canada’s national media as a terrorist sympathizer and white supremacist. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, I faced near-total exclusion from public, social, or economic life. I was cancelled.
“Cancellations” follow a now-familiar pattern: a person—usually but not always a minor public figure in a reputation-based field—is accused of a taboo violation. Sometimes the person has violated a widely recognized social norm, but in most cases their offense is ambiguous or unintentional: they have transgressed an emergent or contested norm, newly defended as inviolable by an activist minority. Perhaps they took a position on a contentious social issue, or attempted to critically examine a topic that certain people have declared off-limits to philosophical inquiry. Sometimes they have done nothing wrong at all, but their words or actions have been misinterpreted—honestly or otherwise—and made to appear nefarious.
The target is then denounced and humiliated online and in the media in a manner that is wildly disproportionate to the severity of the actual or putative offence. The outraged parties call for the target to be fired from their job, denied a public platform, and socially isolated, permanently.
In this way, “cancel” campaigns are distinct from criticism: they are not a form debate, and are not oriented toward seeking truth or expanding any moral or intellectual horizons. When a person is censored, de-platformed, or deprived of their livelihood for thinking the wrong thing, their detractors rarely attempt to understand their ideas or engage with them on their merits. More often, the accusers will assign their target some incendiary, thought-stopping label—bigot, fascist, misogynist, homophobe, white supremacist, etc.—and then declare dialogue or debate to be illegitimate and morally suspect. Wielding the threat of social ostracism and financial ruin, the goal is to effect a shift in the range of ideas that can be discussed and contemplated without fear. The object is not persuasion, but intimidation.
Continued association with the target becomes a liability. Friends and former colleagues are pressured to disassociate from and denounce them, lest they be judged guilty by association. Image-conscious organizations cut ties with the accused to avoid collateral reputational damage. Rather than assuaging the public’s rage, these capitulations are taken as proof that the person deserves to be a target of opprobrium.
The entirety of the person’s professional accomplishments, and every aspect of their character, is instantly (and, in the age of Google, permanently) eclipsed by the accusations. Their personal record, intentions, what they actually think and believe, and the inner virtues they possess, are immaterial. As in Dante’s Inferno, they are condemned to suffer forever as payment for their worst sin—or, rather, for what the Internet imagines their worst sin to be.
If a person is condemned on the basis of allegations that turn out to be incomplete, misleading, or altogether false, well, by then the damage is done, and there is seldom any authority to whom they can appeal for redress. Deprived of the support of friends and community, and unable either to earn a living or to secure a path to redemption, many targets of these campaigns struggle with suicidal ideation. Some of them succumb.
Meanwhile, for those who wield potentially career or life-destroying accusations dishonestly or unjustifiably, there is rarely any price to be paid (no obvious price, in any case; the degradation of their own souls notwithstanding).
Under these circumstances, it shouldn’t surprise us if some enterprising individuals instrumentalize public shaming campaigns to achieve unrelated ends: to settle personal scores, for instance, or to advance a political agenda. That is one way to understand what happened to me.
In 2018, I decided to run for political office.
It was a career choice for which I was, in many ways, badly ill-suited: I abhorred the theatre and the tribalism of politics, the privileging of expediency over principles, and the way that discussions of complex trade-offs are reduced to slogans and soundbites. I am a bad partisan, being generally incapable of holding a party line against the dictates of my own conscience. And no matter how noble their intentions, a politician’s job in the election period is one of shameless self-promotion. Even after nine months of campaigning, I could never quite overcome the shame part.
But I was not a terrible candidate. Voters responded to a vision of conservatism that stressed intellectual humility and openness, and recognized that the greatest social goods are the intangible ones: trust, generosity, beauty, and human connection.
Local and national newspapers ran laudatory profiles about my candidacy, sometimes highlighting my record of human rights work on behalf of persecuted religious and ethnic minorities abroad. I became one of the faces of my party, and was described as representing the next generation of conservative leadership. In a highly contested swing seat, I had vastly out-fundraised my opponents, and voter identification data showed I was on track to win.
Then, on the eve of the election call, a partisan website closely aligned with my political opponents (the NDP) published an anonymous accusation that I had “echoed white nationalist rhetoric” and “complained terrorists are treated unfairly” in a private conversation years earlier. When my unnamed accuser was asked to produce the full transcript of that conversation for independent scrutiny, he refused.
As if to compensate for the threadbare quality of the evidence, my political opponents amplified the accusations at full volume, denouncing me as an “abhorrent,” “vile” racist with “shocking” views. They demanded that I be removed from the ballot, publicly shamed and ostracized, and driven from public life. Without waiting for the facts to emerge, members of the media piled on. I was branded a white supremacist, a “crypto-fascist,” a Nazi, and a terrorist sympathizer.
In the span of four hours, my political candidacy, and my life as I knew it, was over.
For next month, there were near-daily stories about me in national news media, along with repeated demands that I confess and apologize for imagined heresies. People I had never met appeared in national media to attribute to me baleful and inane beliefs that I have never held. Journalists who tried asking questions, or who believed that I should have a right to defend myself, were pressured, denounced, and threatened with boycott campaigns. Friends and colleagues, perhaps fearing that the scandal would be contagious, went silent.
The media conflagration destroyed my career and reputation, probably irredeemably, because the internet never forgets. At 32, I became effectively unemployable — a stressful position for someone who is the primary breadwinner for a family of four. I was condemned to live as a kind of ghost: still conscious, seeing everything, feeling everything, yet no longer part of the world. The poet Ovid described exile as a living death, and I can do no better.
The accusations against me came from a website called Press Progress, which appeared to function as the opposition research mill for the far-left New Democratic Party, or NDP. They were based on few disjointed lines of a private, academic conversation from years earlier, in which an erstwhile friend and I discussed immigration, identity, and radicalization. The full conversation went on for several months and spanned many thousands of words, but the public was shown only a few ambiguous sentences from a text conversation: decontextualized, edited, and placed into a new context so as to impute to me ideas I have never held.
(I’m often asked why I didn’t just disclose the full conversation. I had deleted the text exchange a year earlier, in 2018, at the request of the other party. It took several more years and a contested court order to finally obtain the record).
In one of the conversations, I had suggested that policymakers should endeavour to understand how far-right terrorists are radicalized, and why some people are drawn to what I called the “perverse” and “odious” ideology of white supremacy. I further noted that, just as it is unhelpful to blame an entire faith community for isolated acts of Islamist terrorism, it is also counterproductive to label everyone who supports national borders or controlled immigration a white supremacist. Calling people names, accusing them of racial animus, and shutting down discussions on matters of legitimate public concern does not lead to better policy outcomes, and neither does it change minds. Doing that takes persuasion, and persuasion can only work when we understand the positions of other people on their own terms.
On the basis of that exchange, Press Progress wrote a headline saying I had “complained white supremacist terrorists are treated unfairly.” That was absurd. If I was lamenting anything, it was that aspects of the prevailing approach to combating far-right extremism are not empirically sound, and may actually contribute to radicalization and a hardening of positions.
By way of background, I had studied counter-terrorism and worked in international security fields. At the time of these conversations, I was in Europe studying transitional justice, discrimination, and refugee and asylum law as part of a Master’s degree in international human rights. In other words, I was immersed personally and professionally in a complex issue that I was trying to understand, and I believed the other person in the conversation shared the same earnest goal. It turned out that he was not.
In another quote attributed to me, I responded to the proposition that “white peoples” are experiencing “demographic replacement” in their home countries. This was a reference to the fact that Western Europe and the Anglosphere are undergoing significant transformations as a result of sub-replacement birthrates, an ageing population, and high levels of international migration – what demographers sometimes refer to as “replacement migration.”
That these trends are altering the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious profile of these countries is indisputable: by the end of this century, most Western nations are projected to be a majority-minority countries (Canada is projected to cross that threshold around 2040). Policy-makers have a duty to grapple honestly and responsibly with these trends, and to develop strategies to mitigate any negative second-order effects they might produce. I noted that some of the negative consequences of mass migration and population decline include social and political destabilization and unrest. Echoing common critiques of globalization from the left and right, I also lamented the possible loss of demographic and cultural diversity.
I could very well be wrong in assuming these outcomes. But that was the point: private conversations should be a safe place to examine assumptions, subject them to scrutiny, and perhaps arrive at a more nuanced and considered understanding of a complex topic.
Elsewhere in the same conversation, I expressly stated that I don’t support any policies of discrimination based on race. I said that I don’t believe race is the primary determinant of culture. I noted that horizontal transmission of culture is a real thing that does happen — a position that would presumably be abhorrent to an actual white nationalist. I said that I would lament the prospective loss of any culture or people, not just European ones. I did not express opposition to immigration. I never disparaged anyone, nor did I posit any kind of racial, ethnic, or cultural hierarchy. But my actual meaning and intent didn’t matter: all that mattered to my accusers was that I had used words (“demographic replacement”) that they could stretch to fit their Procrustean prosecution.
From there, Press Progress made the extraordinary leap of insinuating that I supported the murder of 50 innocent Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, which occurred only three days earlier. As evidence, the article pointed out that I had not written about the massacre on social media: “While political leaders in Canada and around the world have denounced racism and anti-Muslim bigotry, Ford’s social media has so far remained silent on the subject” — as though the public performance of grief counts for more than a decade of actual advocacy on behalf of persecuted and marginalized minorities, Uyghur Muslims among them. (Also, I actually had expressed condemnation for the massacre on social media).
The article was a patchwork of conspiratorial innuendo, motivated reasoning, and outright fabrications. On the identity of my unnamed accuser, Press Progress said he was being protected because of threats of retribution. They failed to mention that the man had been harassing me for over a year; his conduct was so outrageous that I was eventually granted a permanent restraining order against him, and it resulted in the recognition of a new tort of civil harassment in Alberta. Press Progress never communicated any of this to their readers.
Instead, readers were meant to take the message that I sympathize with terrorists, hate immigrants, threaten whistleblowers, and that I endorse white supremacist ideology. No literate person, acting in good faith, could have read the unedited text of my conversations and reached these conclusions. But the full text of the conversations was concealed from the public, and my accusers were not acting in good faith: they weren’t going to stop until I was off the ballot. If that meant destroying my life and livelihood, and cynically misappropriating a tragedy to cause needless anguish to members of the Muslim community, so be it.
“After 50 Muslims were gunned down in New Zealand during peaceful prayer, does the [conservative party] really want a candidate who says white supremacists are misunderstood?,” read the article. The party “needs to disqualify her immediately.”
About an hour later – before I had a chance to respond – the NDP issued a press release demanding that my party’s leader “do the right thing” and remove me as a candidate. “[The conservative leader] needs to answer one question about Caylan Ford – why is she still on the ballot?” My political opponents then amplified the message in a chorus of outraged social media posts: my views were “racist,” “sickening,” “vile” and “shocking,” they insisted. And if you couldn’t understand why – and many people couldn’t – it was because your views are appalling too.
Journalists quickly started piling on, and began calling to ask whether I would withdraw my candidacy. If any of them were troubled by thinness of the evidence against me or the obvious bad faith of my accusers, their hesitation didn’t register in their stories. No one seemed concerned that the charges against me were based on edited selections of a private conversation, the authenticity of which was impossible to confirm, and the full record of which my accuser refused to disclose. Almost no one bothered to inquire about the identity or motivations of the anonymous source. Neither did anyone stop to consider that the accusations against me were incongruous with every aspect of my public record: I had spent my entire adult life advocating on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers, immersing myself in the study of Chinese history and culture, and working with members of immigrant communities to document human rights violations against marginalized minorities abroad. None of this mattered.
Under different circumstances, I might have been able to explain what I actually think and believe, dispelling the false accusations against me and allaying the concerns of members of immigrant communities. But as the political cliché goes: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Besides, the media had already made up their minds.
Being publicly shamed and humiliated is a brutalizing psychological experience. But the actual “cancellation”—the casting out from society—can only be effected through an act of institutional capitulation. And no organization is more anxious or reactive than a political party on the eve of an election.
I had given nearly a year of my life to the campaign. My (then) husband suspended his career to care for our two children. We depleted our savings, and I missed most of the first year of my younger daughter’s life. In return for those sacrifices, I was offered ten minutes to write a statement of resignation.
(The sense of betrayal I experienced, and the indignant shock at encountering such cravenness, was best captured by Shakespeare’s Coriolanus when he faced banishment from the city that he had fought to defend:
“Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.”)
I posted a resignation statement at ten minutes to midnight. Then I sat with the remnants of my campaign staff. I read some poems and a bit of Platonic dialogue, thanked them for their thousands of hours of wasted volunteer work, and went home.
By the next morning the story was national news. The leader of one provincial political party issued a press release declaring that my “support of white supremacist values will sicken decent people across the province.” The progressive mayor of my city accused me of spreading white supremacy, and implied that I was bereft of humaneness or decency. People I had never met projected all sorts of bizarre beliefs onto me, insisting that they knew my mind better than I did.
In quick succession I was labelled a terrorist sympathizer, a racist, crypto-fascist, Nazi, extremist, and an Islamophobe. A prominent political activist wrote that I had the blood of murdered children on my hands, and thousands of others piled on. The person I saw being discussed online was a stranger to me. The experience was dizzying and disorienting. It’s like encountering a funhouse mirror image of yourself: someone with your name and features, but none of your dimensions.
Professional journalists were no better. A headline by Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC, called me a star candidate who “resigned over white supremacist comments” (I had called white supremacy was “odious” and “perverse”). One columnist declared that I think ethnic minorities are “inferior”— a claim that is both untrue and deeply hurtful to the very people its author purported to care about. Another reporter from a national newspaper chain appeared to publicly intimidate her professional colleagues: if any journalist thought there could be another side to my story, or that I deserved an opportunity to speak for myself, “please, show yourselves,” she said, because those views are also “problematic.”
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the temporary alliance forged between an intellectual elite and the mob—an alliance which rested largely on the “genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.” To this, she added that the revolutionary elite had a “terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts […] and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.”
This was the thought that crossed my mind as activists and news agencies wrote over and over again that I “promoted white supremacy,” “denigrated ethnic minorities,” and made “hateful” posts on social media. I hadn’t done any of these things, though the force and endless repetition of the accusations almost convinced me that I had.
For more than a week after my resignation, I was reluctant to leave my house. When, after a few days, I finally ventured a trip to the bank, I saw my face on the front page of the local newspaper accompanied by the boldface headline “WE NEED HIGHER STANDARDS.” The article said that I came from a “garbage pool.” I turned around and walked out.
It was not enough that I had resigned my candidacy and would not serve in elected office: my banishment needed to be permanent and total. The NDP and its fellow travellers called out my friends for associating with me, and demanded that my party membership be revoked. Critics hounded media producers and journalists who had spoken to me, and tried to figure out if I had any other employers who could be intimidated into firing me.
I understood why people refer to these campaigns as witch hunts. The term evokes the madness of crowds, the flight from reason, and the ritualistic expurgation of the heretic. In a witch hunt, the arbitrary target is transfigured from a human being into an abstraction, condemned not for their own sins, but for the sins of the community that are projected onto them. As a symbol of moral pollution, their destruction is celebrated as a righteous purge. Their death is the price of social absolution.
When you’re being mounted to a pyre, there is no point in protesting that you are not a witch. Your prosecutors are impervious to evidence; they need you to be a witch. If my fate couldn’t be avoided, I could at least try to meet it with a bit of dignity. “Set honest deeds against dishonest words,” I told myself, and trust that people of discernment will see things as they truly are.
But sometimes people need some help understanding what’s real. So ten days after my resignation, I appeared on a popular talk radio show to tell my side of the story for first the time, hoping to ease some of the confusion and the pain that the initial reporting about me had caused.1
In the radio interview I explained that I don’t hold the views that were attributed to me in the media, reiterated my position that white supremacy is a pernicious and unthinking ideology, and warned about the corrosive effects of outrage culture on our democracy.
Feedback from the general public was overwhelmingly positive: most were satisfied that I was not the monster I’d been made out to be. But instead of being relieved to learn that I had no sympathy for white supremacy, my political opponents seemed incensed. I had become a useful symbol of the bigotry supposedly concealed within the conservative movement, and for their cause to succeed the symbol had to be defended against reality.
A third-party political advertiser aligned with the NDP launched a petition calling for “serious consequences” against the radio host, who stood accused of giving a platform to white supremacy and Islamophobia (I had abjured white supremacy, and said nothing about Islam). “If corrective action isn’t taken we can and will escalate […] and look at targeting her advertisers,” they warned.2 The progressive mayor of my city piled on again, calling for boycotts of the radio program.
A journalist with the Toronto Star fumed on Twitter, even before the interview began: “What in the fresh hell are we doing giving a platform to an unrepentant white supremacist”? In trials by media, there can be no presumption of innocence, no rules of evidence, and no right to a defence.
The radio host initially stood her ground and defended my right to a public hearing. But in the end it didn’t matter. The interview was pulled offline, followed in turn by every other interview I had done. I felt as though I had been buried alive for a second time. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — these words took on a new and searing poignancy.
Journalists and editors with four different Canadian publications later told me that they knew the narrative about me was false, but they could not report on my story because they, or their bosses, didn’t want to be targeted next. The media likes to remind us that “democracy dies in darkness.” It also dies in the glare of a blazing torchlight parade.
The logic of guilt-by-association was extended to my friends and former colleagues, many of whom faced repeated demands to publicly disavow me.
After my resignation, the conservatives appointed a young Vietnamese-Canadian pastor as my replacement. I had run against him in the nomination contest, and believed him a decent and competent person. So when the NDP published a press release attacking him as a “misogynist”, I went on twitter to defend him. I argued that political parties should campaign on substantive policies, rather than trying to win elections through disingenuous, scorched-earth personal attacks.
Two other minor public figures liked my tweet. But even that small display of solidarity could not go unpunished: for liking a tweet denouncing ad hominem attacks against a person of colour, Press Progress wrote an article and produced a video accusing them of “showing support” for “a white supremacist.”
If the goal was to instil fear, it worked. While my former colleagues expressed private sympathy, associating with me publicly carried a cost that few were willing to bear. With a handful of exceptions, most people found it easier to simply pretend that I didn’t exist. I was disinvited from events and removed from Christmas card distribution lists. People unfollowed me on social media, scrubbed any evidence of a past friendship, and refused to meet my eye in public.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila had it right: “The deepest silence is that of a terrified crowd.”
After the election was over and the media storm passed, I was left surveying the ruin of my life.
I had lost my name, and will never fully get it back. The reputation that I had built over more than a decade was destroyed in a single evening. I will never have a career in politics, and I remain severely constrained in the ways that I can serve my community. A Google search of my (very unique) name turns up pages upon pages of accusations of white supremacy, making me a liability to any cause I attach my name to.
It took 4.5 years to find stable employment again — and that was only because I built an organization from scratch that could hire me.
I was the primary breadwinner for my family and my young children. Being unable to work, we lived for years below the poverty line, unsure of when or if it would end. I lost friends and was alienated from family members. My marriage tragically did not survive the years of severe depression, the social isolation, or the stress of financial penury.
And then there was the loss of purpose. Insofar as we’re given certain gifts, they are not ours alone to use for our enrichment or pleasure; they are given to us to use in the service of others. But now I was of no use to anyone.
I thought often about John Milton’s poem on his blindness. Milton believed that his talents were given to him by God in order that he could serve. But at the age of 43, at the peak of his ambition and talent, he was struck blind. This was a source of great perplexity: why would God give someone a gift, only to take away their ability to use it? He wrote:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
Milton wrote the consolation that “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.”
That’s the critical thing, isn’t it? To try to be worthy of your suffering: to bear it nobly and unflinchingly, even when you don’t fully understand it. And so I tried, in whatever small way I could, to be a good presence in the world: to be a loving mother, to give comfort to strangers, to not disappoint my friends too often. I tried not to give in to resentment or despair, because if I indulged in those failings then I will have really lost something.
But I would be lying if I claimed that I was never angry.
Once, when the few podcast interviews that I had done were taken offline due to threats, I got into my car and drove to the mountains.
Long, solitary walks through alpine trails were the only times when I could exhaust the tears and the rage. I would rail in my mind against the friends whose betrayal and cowardice stung so deeply – the people who had determined that my life, and all that I might contribute to the world, was not worth the tiny bit of social capital that it would take to defend me. Thoughts of resentment, fear for the future, and incredulous anger filled my mind while I drove to the trailhead. And as I turned, racing, onto the long unpaved road that led deep into the rocky mountains, I blew past a stop sign.
An officer pulled me over. The fine was substantial. I sat in my car as he processed the ticket, and all the frustration dissolved into to laugher. “What grace the gods have shown me,” I thought. “When I have the temerity to curse my fate, they still care enough to stop me.” The officer returned to my window, and told me that he would void the ticket.
When you go through trials, ask yourself: when I look back at this years hence, will I be proud of the person I became when my character was tested? Did I bear my fate with grace? Was I just, and grateful, and equanimous? And if not, and if the trial is ongoing, then be glad: you still have chances.
From time to time I would attempt to privately engage with my detractors on social media. If they were hurt or offended by what they had read about me, I wanted to try to assuage their concerns and their pain. If I was wrong about something, if my ideas were mistaken, or if there was some perspective I hadn’t considered on the matter of radicalization or demographic change, I wanted to know so that I could revise my position. But I found that my attackers were rarely interested in persuasion, either theirs or mine.
“I would like to know why you’re saying I’m a white supremacist,” I would ask, to which the most common response was some version of “It’s not my job to educate you” or “lmao Nazi.” When asked which of my ideas—my actual ideas—they found objectionable, and why, they could not answer. The concept of a dialectical argument seemed alien to nearly all the people I tried conversing with. It was as if their minds had been captured by an amalgam of catch-phrases, slogans, and associations, which precluded all possibility of thought.
There were close exceptions, but they were not encouraging. One young man admitted that my proposed approach to countering far-right radicalization would be more effective than his, but he still considered it to be morally suspect because it would require engagement with people he hated. Another said that the facts I observed were true, but that in building a better world, truth did not matter. It may even need to be suppressed so that the new world would have room to be born. I found these arguments unconvincing, but at least they tried. Most of the people simply declined a private discussion: once the performative dimension of the public shaming experience was removed, they lost interest.
Even though my condemners could not explain how they thought I had erred in my reasoning, they were adamant that I deserved what I got, and that I must apologize for the harm that my thinking had caused.
Some people were genuinely hurt by the stories they read about me: they were led to believe a lie that I hated immigrants and thought ethnic minorities are somehow “inferior.” That this pain was inflicted in my name was a source of considerable anguish. I know very well what it is be told that you are hated for your religion or identity. It is not a fun experience. It’s not vindicating or empowering, as some people seem to believe. It’s awful, and it is a feeling that I would never willfully inflict on anyone.
But in determining culpability for harm, two factors are relevant. The first in intent. If a person intends to harm—if, for example, they belittle others for the purpose of causing pain and humiliation, or to sow division and mistrust, or if they are reckless as to the suffering they cause—they should be reproached, for their own sake and that of others.
But I had no intention of causing pain. My intention was to try to understand a complex social phenomenon and interrogate my own assumptions in the process. Though they can sometimes be taken to unhealthy extremes, intellectual openness is not a moral failings for which a person deserves to have their lives destroyed. If I had been intentionally cruel or if I had acted with malice, I would apologize without hesitation. But I never tried to hurt anyone, and that is far more than can be said of my accusers.
A second factor in assigning guilt is the impact of an action: the objective harm that was caused, irrespective of intent. But I could not understand how I was responsible for the harm in this case. I had victimized no one when, years earlier, I had a private conversation with someone I thought was a friend. The harmful impact came when my political opponents published excerpts of that conversation: edited, decontextualized, reinterpreted in a deliberately hurtful and inflammatory way, and then disseminated as widely as possible.
Why were people demanding that I apologize for harm that I had not caused? Did they hope to have a relationship with me? If I had apologized, would they have welcomed me back into society? Research says otherwise: rather than repairing the bonds of comity, public apologies can actually exacerbate hostility toward the person apologizing, confirming the original charge and exposing them to even greater contempt and outrage.
The people demanding apologies were clearly not interested in persuading or educating me, even though I was openly solicitous of dialogue. Neither were they interested in my moral improvement. To the contrary, they seemed to be pursuing my moral debasement. Whether someone demands that you apologize and repent for beliefs that you do not actually hold, or for beliefs that you do honestly hold, they are demanding that you lie. I would not acquiesce to people who wanted to make me lie.
Among my few public supporters were friends who had fled Communist China. They recognized what had happened to me. They had a name for it: I had been the target of a douzheng campaign, they said. A “struggle.”
In 1966, Mao Zedong launched a mass movement to eradicate the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and the old ideas of the exploiting classes. In the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, temples were desecrated or razed, and millions of books were destroyed, along with religious objects, art, literature, and other expressions of traditional or “bourgeois” culture. Opponents of the revolutionary cause would be “struggled” against: hounded from their jobs, beaten, and paraded through the streets to be ritually humiliated and denounced. They would be branded with some vague yet terrifying label – reactionary, rightist, counter-revolutionary, member of a “black class” – and were made to publicly confess and apologize for their incorrect thoughts.
Intellectuals, teachers, and religious believers were common targets of the struggle sessions, but the Red Guards didn’t discriminate. A single innocuous possession—a clipping from a foreign newspaper, a musical instrument, an article of worship, a past affiliation with an enemy of the regime, or a simple accusation—was all the evidence needed to initiate a struggle session. The country’s leadership encouraged these outbursts of violence, declaring that beating “bad people” was a good thing. (Without a fixed moral standard, good and bad, like truth and falsehood, is whatever power says it is).
Observers of the struggle sessions were made to understand that anything short of complete submission to the new orthodoxy would not be tolerated. Informants were everywhere and, as in all totalitarian projects, the boundary between public and private spheres collapsed. It wasn’t enough for a person to toe the line outwardly; even contrary thoughts, uttered in secret, were perilous. Bonds of friendship and trust were under constant threat: you never knew who might inform on you, or which of your friends you would be asked to denounce. To the extent that people had any private doubts about Communist rule, or any sympathy or affection toward the accused, they learned to keep those thoughts to themselves.
The purpose of the struggle sessions was not to persuade anyone of the truth of Communist propaganda. The purpose was to terrorize, and more importantly to demoralize. As the British essayist Anthony Daniels put it, “when people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
As many as two million people were killed in the Cultural Revolution, and millions more were physically brutalized and tortured. In that sense, there is no quantifiable equivalence to what is now occurring in liberal democracies. Yet the true toll of these mass campaigns cannot be measured in deaths alone. Even without physical violence, the psychic and intangible costs of the struggle sessions were enormous. China’s spiritual, moral, and aesthetic culture was all but destroyed. Truth was suffocated. Openness and simplicity in human relations broke down, as neighbours and friends turned on each other.
I used to wonder how whole societies could be captured by such evil ideologies. Part of the answer is that these ideologies were not transparently evil—not at the outset, anyway. They were dressed up with noble phrases and high-minded promises: to right historic wrongs, liberate the oppressed, and remake the world without suffering and inequality. But eventually the true nature of these movements reveals itself. Why then did so many people assent to live within lies? Why did they accept their own demoralization? How could they passively watch as their culture was desecrated, their freedoms were trammeled, and as their fellow human beings were destroyed?
Perhaps they just did what they had to do to survive, hoping that if they went along and kept their heads down, they would be spared. Most people don’t attribute much meaning to their silence, their passivity, or to their willingness to mouth the prescribed slogans. But even seemingly insignificant acts of acquiescence have meaning. A system of lies is built on millions of small surrenders.
It was tempting—and maybe not unwarranted—to assume that my attackers were engaged in an act of dominance and humiliation for the sheer fun of it. A more generous interpretation is that they were acting on the basis of an alternative moral framework: one in which the virtues of justice, human-heartedness, and truth are either irrelevant, or have been perverted and subordinated by a totalizing ideology.
In answer to the question “why is there suffering in the world,” one might answer that we suffer because of the kinds of beings we are: fallen, often selfish, usually ignorant, and endowed with a capacity for both good and evil. The classical explanation for why injustice and corruption exist is that a disordered society reflects the disordered souls of men writ large. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reflected from his straw pallet in the gulag, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” Any attempt to order a political community toward goodness thus depends on individuals achieving order and justice in their own hearts—through temperance and self-discipline, honesty, and the practice of virtue.
Ideology offers another set of answers to these questions, answers that come with no rigorous demands for personal moral rectitude. To the ideologue, the source of suffering and inequity lies not in the heart of each person, but arises from the faulty organization of the world. Solving the problem of injustice and suffering is thus reduced to the simple matter of dismantling the existing order and beginning anew. In their hubris, the ideologue does not admit the stubborn permanence of human nature: once properly organized, they think, our capacity for selfishness and avarice will disappear, and everyone will live together in freedom and equality.
Ideological projects are thus never oriented toward the perfection of the individual soul, but always toward the perfection of systems. The whole of moral conduct is thereby reduced to holding the correct opinions. It did not matter at all to the activists denouncing me whether I am decent, or honest, or how well I treat people. It certainly did not matter that I had devoted much of my life to assisting victims of prejudice and persecution. Meanwhile, they celebrated and excused the openly malicious and dishonest conduct of my accusers, because it was deployed in service of an ostensibly righteous cause.
We all have an innate capacity for selfishness. But ideology is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “it is the social theory which helps to make [the evildoer’s] acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes.”
Because ideology treats salvation as a collective and political, rather than personal, undertaking, it can only succeed when every person assents to the world-remaking agenda. Those who do not are bad people: regardless of whatever inner qualities they possess, they are standing in the way of the always-imminent utopian order. Dissenters must therefore be singled out and made an example of, rather than tolerated or disagreed with.
In this Manichean worldview, love and compassion are not extended toward the real human being whose career and reputation is unjustly destroyed. Instead, “love” is an abstract principle, expressed not in our treatment of our fellows, but in holding the correct opinions – or in having the right enemies. It is the love of Mankind, but not of individual men.
Before this happened to me, I assumed that no one would want to live in a world where people cannot privately discuss ideas without fear that they might be talking to an informant. A world without privacy is one where the exercise of civil liberties become impossible. It is a world where everyone is the enemy of everyone else, where there can be no trust or tenderness among friends, and no room for openness among strangers. But I guess I was wrong; these are precisely the conditions that some people—and a surprising number of professional journalists—are apparently eager to create.
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides describes the moral and spiritual confusion that engulfed the Hellenic world in the fifth century BC. Amidst a greater struggle for dominance between Athens and Sparta, vicious civil wars broke out, as small states were forced to choose sides:
The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. […]
Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could not afford to trust others.
The problem with outrage campaigns is not just that they are unfair and dehumanizing to the individual targets, or that they chill free inquiry and the pursuit of truth, or that they do not allow for reconciliation.
The real problem is that they punish and discourage the very foundations of human virtue and civil society: generosity, humility, tolerance, loyalty to friends, courage, forgiveness, a commitment to fairness and to truth. These qualities are made to appear as vices, and vices as virtue. The mob demands that people lie, that they denounce their friends, and that they disregard what is just. Charity, prudence, and a slowness to judgement are treated with suspicion, as though they are evidence of an insufficient commitment to the cause. In the name of love and tolerance and solidarity, we are asked to hate our enemies, and in so doing, we do violence to ourselves.
The radio host, Danielle Smith, is now the Premier of Alberta.
The group that published the petition, Progress Alberta, has since settled my defamation claim for $250,000.