The Professional Regulation of Anti-Woke Satire
Regulators seek the most extreme penalty, signaling that left wing social re-engineering is no laughing matter!
“The citizens of Canada need to know that we are being subjected to a soft revolution, and it’s being done through DEI bureaucracy.” - Cheryl Gould (canceled teacher)
In 2021, Ontario teacher Cheryl Gould was fired from her teaching position with the Toronto Catholic District School board after 18 years of impeccable service. The reason for the termination was becuase Cheryl had the audacity to give her opinions at a union meeting, designed for that purpose, in which she was assured was a “safe space.”
It turns out the space was actually not so safe for people with dissenting views. This is the part of the story where my blood starts to boil. Also, it’s the part that makes me feel somewhat negligent and ashamed. I’ve known about Cheryl’s story since 2021, and unlike other Canadian teachers, like Chanel Pfahl and Jim McMurtry, I have yet to write about it. That changes today. Cheryl is stuck with me now. I am on this story becuase it is just as disgusting and outrageous (and un-Canadian) as Jim’s and Chanel’s - and there are many others too, Carolyn Burjoski and Trustee Linda Stone come to mind.
After the disingenuously “safe” union meeting, Cheryl became a target of the Woke mob. It was discovered that she posts her political opinions, sometimes in a satirical way, on Facebook using the pseudonym, Harvey C Catherine. Once discovered, the woke used this against her.
The most recent development in Cheryl’s case is that the Ontario College of Teachers have revoked her teaching license.
The X post above was posted by Cheryl on June 24, the message she wrote accompanying the above image was as follows:
I didn't become a teacher for job security and holidays. I was an honour roll student who could have made HEAPS more money in any number of other professions.
For me, teaching was a vocation... I wanted to help individuals, save them from control freaks, soulless bureaucrats, and dehumanizing systems.
So, I was never going to be silent about ascending ideologies that are noxious and bring harm to people and society.
Read the report from Rebel News dated May 17, 2024, by Tamara Ugolini. And, see the video interview below. Below that, read about Cheryl’s predicament in her own words (notice what a great writer she is).
(The following article on Cheryl’s case, written by Cheryl, originally appeared on her Substack.)
The Professional Regulation of Anti-Woke Satire
By Cheryl Gould
The Ontario College of Teachers wants to revoke my license.
They don’t merely want to re-educate me, as in the case of The College of Psychologists Of Ontario vs Jordan Peterson.
And they aren’t looking to suspend me for a time, a penalty meted out to countless teachers accused of abusing students.
My case involves no student or parent complaints. But revocation is still their goal.
I am in this trouble because colleagues offended by my socio-political opinions complained about my use of social media platforms to publish “offensive” ideas. And this makes me dangerous and unfit to teach, says the OCT.
As a private citizen, using a pseudonym, I posted online commentary and images deemed socially unacceptable by the left wing politburo.
The OCT posted a Notice of Hearing online. Infraction (a) in the list is a Facebook bio I wrote in 2020 in which I “confess” to being a hate-filled right wing extremist.
Let me confess here (with some shame) that I used to vote NDP. Sometimes Liberal. Occasionally Green. I am turning 55. From the age of 15 until around 35, I thought I belonged on the left. I considered myself an independent thinker, a classical liberal, artsy and spiritual, a freedom-centric nature nut, a proponent of diversity, compassionate and forgiving: most definitely opposed to “the far right”, as well as racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
So, why did I write a bio in 2020 slandering myself with all those labels?
To mock cancel culture, of course!
It’s called satire.
I grew up in a culture full of satire — the younger folks might not believe this, but western people used to love satire! Satire has been part of western culture since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Satire became especially prevalent in the modern era, and was an important part of our culture until quite recently, when satirists began getting cancelled (and sometimes outright slaughtered) by those offended by their satire, or by bureaucrats certain that someone somewhere in the community would likely get offended.
The woke purity spiral gripping western populaces has taken a severe toll on our old friend satire.
But, I digress. Let’s get back to my “right wing extremism”:
In the early 2000s, I started noticing significant cultural shifts were pushing individualists and liberty lovers out of leftist ranks. The free speech culture war has been of significant interest to me since 1989, when I learned that a prominent Islamist placed a bounty on writer Salman Rushdie’s head. In response to this clash of fundamental civilizational values, I watched western progressives systematically chipping away at protections for freedom of conscience and speech. Attacking satire and redefining it as “hate speech” is one of their key strategies, along with victim-blaming when terrorists commit atrocities.
By the time the Charlie Hebdo massacre occurred in 2015, the left had already left me entirely. I had become one of a growing legion of leftugees, to borrow a term I heard Michael Shellenberger use.
For years now, in every possible arena of concern, our left-leaning leaders have responded to cultural conflict by adopting de facto blasphemy laws to penalize and silence voices espousing ideas that are conservative, libertarian, Christian, pro-western.
The Overton window has moved so far left that even classical liberals are now demonized by leftists as “far right extremists” for expressing views that used to be considered mainstream and centrist.
Freedom-fighters are now found within the ranks of the right. Many of them might not self-identify as right wing, but they should at least accept that in our new socio-political reality, “right wing extremist” and “fascist” have become mere slurs slung at anyone who dares to counter woke revolutionary dogma. In my Facebook bio, I decided to embrace the label in a tongue-in-cheek manner because my audience is made up of people familiar with this juvenile left wing smear strategy.
Any apostate from the left who is active online will tell you this: if you put forward ideas that challenge the progressive leftist agenda, no matter how reasonable and evidence-based those ideas are, you WILL be slandered and demonized, and risk professional cancellation.
You will be called racist for rejecting the race Marxism of CRT/BLM/DEI, even if you’re Black.
You will be called homophobic and/or transphobic for rejecting SOGI indoctrination and “gender-affirming care” for minors, even if you’re gay or trans.
You will be called Islamophobic if you reject Islamic blasphemy prohibitions and criticize Islamic ideology, even if you are from a Muslim family/heritage.
You will be called xenophobic if you want to stop people with anti-western beliefs and values from immigrating to western nations, even if you are an immigrant who moved to a western nation to escape tyranny.
Virtue signalers constructing such smears often preface their insults with disingenuous sympathy words designed to suggest they are motivated to slander others because they are deeply compassionate people who love humanity. Despite oozing rage and resentment, woke culture warriors typically say things like “I honestly feel sorry for you, going through life with so much hate inside”. These hypocrites were the inspiration for the final words of the offending bio: “…that better people feel sorry for”.
It pains me to deconstruct my own satirical content like this.
But at least my sad fate is literary, has a darkly poetic sort of charm. The book jacket might read: “dissident English & art teacher fond of writing political satire and making memes in her spare time fights to restore her reputation and defend freedom of conscience/speech after being condemned by a humourless, dogmatic revolutionary guard”.
Losing my job was no small thing. We have three children and I was sole breadwinner. Legal fees are costly. The union provided a lawyer willing to defend me in the case against school board, but in the OCT case, the lawyer they provided might as well have been working for the OCT. He refused to mount a defense for me, and so I felt it necessary to waive my right to a union-funded lawyer for that case.
Many now see that the radical changes woke bureaucrats implement (which often do not reflect the will of the people) are agenda items set by World Economic Forum ideologues. The management class in Canada signed us up as a pilot nation in The Great Reset. An unelected globalist elite now directs policy for Canada. If you know anyone baffled by the dramatic changes in Canadian society, just send them a link to the WEF web site.
Canadian bureaucrats now spend vast amounts of public money every year to advance radical platforms and policies — CRT, gender ideology, intersectionalism, decolonization — that barely anyone had heard of a few years ago. These new theoretical frameworks are all fundamentally Marxist/socialist. Cancel culture protected these nascent belief systems from scrutiny, and allowed them to grow strong and dominate.
Even in cases against dissident professionals where no one has claimed or proven any harm occurred — such as my case, the cases of nurse Amy Hamm in BC, Jordan Peterson, and fellow ON teacher Carolyn Burjoski — administrators clearly believe it is their moral duty to pre-emptively shield the public from any potential harm that dissenting opinions might cause.
The New Global Order purports concern for liberation and diversity, but does not recognize individual rights and freedoms, or value debate/diversity of thought. Left wing authoritarian movements always claim lofty humanitarian goals and use “cancel culture” to advance socio-political takeover. People working to cancel dissidents like to pretend that they are protecting vulnerable, oppressed persons, but in truth, the “harm” they work to avoid is more often harm to their own power edifices.
For years, I taught Persepolis, a graphic novel about the 1979 Iranian Revolution that shows what can befall a society when gullible, misguided leftists align with merciless Islamists to stage revolution. The arrogant university-educated communists of Iran thought the Islamic religious fanatics were simple men who would be happy enough just to rule their mosques, leaving statecraft for the much more credentialed communist revolutionaries. Instead, the Islamists slaughtered the communists, took complete control, and to this day, the Iranian people still suffer the tyranny of the Imams.
The Iranian Revolution offers important lessons about the dangers of both leftism and Islamism. Many people today are disturbed by masses of western leftists marching with violent Islamists and justifying the Oct. 7 massacre under the banners of “decolonization” and “antizionism”. And they should be disturbed.
I also taught Brave New World for years, and then found myself living it.
In that futuristic dystopian novel, visionary thinker Aldous Huxley depicted a technocratic globalism, a highly industrialized socialism in which citizens are born in labs, conditioned and indoctrinated from birth, their lives completely controlled by a shadowy cabal of unelected elite. They believe they are blessed and fortunate, and that their extremely authoritarian, materialistic, soulless, unnatural, dehumanizing, exploitative, neofeudal system is the pinnacle of human achievement. It’s a chilling cautionary tale that should seem eerily familiar to anyone living in a western nation in 2024.
I offer those examples from my English teaching practice to help explain why I was able, very early on, to see the real nature of this beastly “Great Reset”. Every particle of my being rejects the deceitful woke revolution, which is NOT creating “social justice” where injustice used to reign. The “social justice” revolution that spawned institutional DEI is simply the newest iteration of the vile old ruse known as “the velvet glove over an iron fist”.
I had no complaints on file, and mine was, overall, quite an uneventful career, until I dared to speak out against the revolutionary zeitgeist during a supposedly confidential union meeting.
During the part of the meeting when we are invited to raise concerns, I questioned vaccine mandates, expressed opposition to CRT/BLM indoctrination, decried the systemic promotion of Marxist revolutionary ideas, and bemoaned the ideological capture that excludes open discourse and debate and demonizes people like me.
My speech outraged several colleagues, who then conspired against me: one of them knew of my Facebook page, and shared it with others, so they could group-report my thought crime. This is what revolutions always do to populaces. Divide and conquer. Get people to turn on each other.
Millions now recognize wokeness and cancel culture as unmitigated disasters. Thankfully, more and more people now connect the dots between the various woke sects (such as CRT and race Marxism, climate alarmism, gender ideology, decolonization, etc) and see these are not separate grassroots movements, but interconnected strands of one massive social engineering agenda being orchestrated by globalist elite.
In many places, people are rejecting the globalist agenda. We’ve seen rightward and nationalistic voting trends internationally, and massive protests are currently underway in many parts of Europe. But bureaucrats pushing left wing progressive policies aligned with Great Reset goals still rule most, if not all, Canadian institutions. These bureaucrats don’t care if the majority is anti-woke. Woke leftists and their globalist sponsors reject democratic ideals — for all their talk of respecting “stakeholders” and “giving a voice to the voiceless”, theirs is an unmistakably top-down agenda.
The Ontario electorate voted a majority Conservative government into power, but conservative thinkers still stand to lose professional licenses for politically charged speech, even made outside of work. My political speech might be characterized as biting and provocative, but it certainly isn’t (yet) illegal, and I’m guessing a majority of Canadians would find my writing and memes perfectly acceptable, in terms of professional standards for off-duty comportment.
Captured institutions now waste billions of tax dollars advancing (and protecting from criticism) destructive neoMarxist ideologies that undermine foundational values of our society. Here’s hoping that subjecting dissidents to re-education programs, and revoking our professional licenses, backfires spectacularly and only contributes to the death of this discriminatory “social justice” revolution.
Thanks for reading. For more on the divisive nature of Diversity Managerialism, read Diversity, our destructive doom, by another anonymous Canadian teacher.
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James Pew contributed a chapter to the best-selling book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
A long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy
For evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
We continue to lose good teachers, doctors and other professionals to this offensive woke ideology.
Fantastic piece.