Tag: political correctness

Alberta woman hauled before human rights tribunal for opposing rainbow crosswalk

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four nearly 80 years ago as a warning about totalitarianism. The novel’s true horror isn’t censorship — it’s compelled speech. In the book’s climax, the rebellious Winston Smith is sent to the Ministry of Love, where torture is used to force him to agree that an obvious falsehood is the truth. Asked how many fingers his tormentor is holding up, the correct answer isn’t four or five — it’s whatever the party says it is.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was fiction. But in 2026, examples of compelled speech in Canada are not hard to find.

Take the claim that a mass grave of Indigenous children sits at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. — a claim unsupported by any forensic evidence to date. Simply asking questions about it, or declining to wear an orange shirt on September 30, is enough to be branded a denier and an enemy of reconciliation. Merely questioning the official Kamloops narrative could one day be treated as a criminal matter.

Then there’s gender identity, where a person born with a penis is a man and a person born with a vagina is a woman — a statement now considered controversial enough to invite official sanction. A U.S. Supreme Court justice, asked to define the word “woman,” could not do it. And in Canadian institutions, a man who says he identifies as a woman is now entitled to compete against women in sports, shower in women’s changerooms, and be housed in women’s prisons. Object, and expect to be labelled a hater, a bigot, and a transphobe.

Canada has no Ministry of Love, and no torture chambers. But there is more than one way to enforce conformity, and a case headed to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal on September 14 shows how it’s done.

Westlock, Alberta, resident Benita Pedersen — a DJ, children’s entertainer, and event coordinator — is facing a human rights complaint over a flyer she handed out three years ago opposing a proposed rainbow crosswalk incorporating the colours of the transgender pride flag. According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom, Pedersen’s flyer stated facts, including the potential for infertility following gender transition, and encouraged residents to contact their elected representatives if they shared her concerns.

On June 19, 2023, local resident Laurie Hodge filed a complaint against Pedersen under the Alberta Human Rights Act, alleging the flyer constituted discrimination based on gender, gender expression, and gender identity. Hodge was not on Westlock town council at the time. Both women ran in a January 2024 by-election; Pedersen finished second, Hodge third — though Hodge was later elected to council in a subsequent vote. Whether the complaint was ever really about a crosswalk, or about eliminating a political rival, is a fair question.

The Director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission has since taken carriage of the complaint on Hodge’s behalf and referred it to the Tribunal under Section 3 of the Act, which bars publications likely to expose people to hatred based on protected characteristics. The Director is expected to call an expert witness to testify that failing to paint the crosswalk could cause physical and mental harm to transgender and marginalized youth. Pedersen, in turn, must rely on evidence from an endocrinologist and a psychiatrist specializing in gender dysphoria simply to defend a flyer about a paint scheme. In May, the Director moved to exclude most of Pedersen’s witnesses as irrelevant; the Tribunal denied that motion in July.

“Albertans should be free to express their opinions on controversial topics without being accused of hatred and discrimination,” said constitutional lawyer Allison Pejovic of the Justice Centre.

Pedersen’s case is not isolated. The Supreme Court of British Columbia has granted four organizations intervenor status in nurse Amy Hamm’s appeal of a March 2025 disciplinary ruling by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives, which found her guilty of unprofessional conduct over online statements she made about sex, gender, and sex-based rights between 2018 and 2021. In a decision released September 8, Justice J. Hughes granted standing to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., West Coast LEAF, Egale Canada, and the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada (ARPA), while dismissing an application from the Vancouver Lesbian Collective. ARPA is expected to argue that criticizing gender identity theory does not amount to discrimination or hatred. Hamm’s appeal is scheduled to be heard in Vancouver this November.

The reach of compelled speech isn’t limited to tribunals and regulators. In 2024, David was covering a story on Ash Davis, a biological male competing on the Fergus Highlanders women’s rugby team, when Ontario Provincial Police officers threatened him with arrest simply for asking questions on a public sports field. Later that same day, while conducting consensual interviews with spectators in the stands — not on the field, not interfering with play — police made good on the threat and arrested him. 

All of this unfolds while southern Ontario endures a record crime wave, raising the obvious question of what, exactly, police resources are being prioritized for.

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University Of Washington Settles Case Against Professor Disciplined For Mocking Land Acknowledgment

Land acknowledgments have become standard at academic and political events, including the opening of the Obama Presidential Library and a recent Michigan Democratic event. While supporters insist it merely shows respect for original inhabitants, critics argue it is the ultimate virtue signaling and is increasingly being forced on both speakers and audiences. One critic is Professor Stuart Reges, who teaches at the computer science and engineering school of the University of Washington. He has now received a settlement from the University of Washington, which spent a significant amount of time and resources in response to his mocking of the school’s land acknowledgment.

We previously discussed the case of Professor Reges, who was disciplined because he refused to post the school’s “land acknowledgment” and instead posted an alternative statement. Professor Reges sued the university and various officials in 2022. Professor Reges has declared “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court.”

The defendants included Nancy Allbritton, the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, UW President Ana Mari Cauce, and the Allen School’s Vice Director Dan Grossman.

After the university encouraged faculty to add a prewritten “Indigenous land acknowledgment” statement to their syllabi, Reges decided to write his own statement. He has now been told that, while the university statement is optional, his statement is unacceptable because it questions the indigenous land claim of the Coast Salish people.

The school provided a recommended statement for all faculty to post and/or read to their students at the first of every course:

“The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.”

Professor Reges disagreed with that statement and expressed his doubts to the faculty while also noting that “Magda” did not want the faculty to discuss such reservations on the email system. That may refer to the Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Magdalena Balazinska.

Reges’ alternative statement read:

“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

The labor theory (which I teach) generally refers to John Locke’s theory. In his Second Treatise, Locke laid the foundation for property as a divine gift of God that began in the state of nature, where all was created in common by God. Reges declared that these tribes, indigenous people, “can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land and that the claim of the university land was not sufficiently used or developed to bestow a claim upon the Coast Salish people. That acknowledged group is a broad collection of different groups with ethnic or linguistic associations.”

In his lawsuit, Professor Reges says that, after he stated his own views, the university moved against him.

“On January 4, 2022, the day after Professor Reges’s Computer Science and Engineering 143 class met for the first time, Defendant [Magdalena] Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, sent Professor Reges an email ordering him to remove the statement from his syllabus because it was ‘offensive’ and created a ‘toxic environment.’“

Reges noted that the university allowed other professors “to include modified statements in their syllabi that were more consistent with the University’s recommended statement.” The operative point is that “other faculty at the Allen School continue to include land acknowledgment statements in their syllabi that differ from the University’s own statement, so long as they express a viewpoint consistent with the University’s recommended version.”

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Regina University union files grievance over dumpster for wrong-think

The University of Regina Faculty Association has filed a formal policy grievance over the presence of a Just Bins dumpster on campus after reportedly failing to have it removed from university property.

Just Bins, a Regina-based waste disposal company known for its irreverent social media presence and outspoken political commentary, revealed the dispute Monday on X.

“After failing to have a Just Bins dumpster removed from university property, the University of Regina Faculty Association has officially filed a policy grievance over the presence of a Just Bins dumpster on the campus,” the company wrote.

A photograph posted alongside the announcement shows one of the company’s bins positioned outside a university building. The union’s complaint reportedly centres on Just Bins’ public messaging rather than the dumpster’s condition or the service being provided.

The garbage container appears to work just fine. The union simply objects to the opinions associated with the company whose logo is painted on it.

Universities routinely present themselves as defenders of academic freedom, ideological diversity and open debate. Attempting to banish a dumpster because its owner expresses unfashionable views would seem to demonstrate precisely the opposite.

For now, the bin remains on campus, stubbornly performing its intended function while committing the apparent offence of belonging to the wrong company.

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Founder of British Flag Flying ‘Raise the Colours’ Campaign Charged with 14 Offences

The creator of the campaign to raise British and English flags across the country to protest against illegal migrants being housed in hotels at taxpayer expense has been charged with 14 criminal offences, including using “threatening, abusive or insulting words”.

Thames Valley Police said on Sunday evening that Ryan Bridge, 45, of Blackwell has been charged with 14 offences relating to alleged incidents between January 31 and March 31 of this year in Oxfordshire.

According to GB News, Bridge was the founder of the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which began last year in opposition to the government policy of taking alleged asylum seekers and placing them in hotels across the country at taxpayer expense.

The police force said that Bridge was charged with seven counts of using threatening words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress and three counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of, or provoke, unlawful violence.

He was also charged with two counts of racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, one count of racially aggravated fear of violence, and one count of common assault.

Thames Valley Police said that they had decided to submit the case to the Crown Prosecution Service following a review of the evidence, witness statements, and video footage.

It comes as the left-wing-run Birmingham city council that they plan on spending around £2.6 million to remove British and English flags from the streets of the UK’s second city.

According to the Daily Telegraph, around 20,000 flags were raised by members of the public on street infrastructure as a part of the Raise the Colours campaign.

The decision to spend millions removing the national flags comes despite the Birmingham currently being in around £3.5 billion in debt, the most of any local government in Britain.

Meanwhile, in Oxfordshire — where the campaign begun — secured an injunction in July to bar anyone from attaching flags to lampposts or to pain the flag on the road.

Those who breach the injunction against raising the flag face potential prison sentences, fines, or even having assets seized, the BBC reported.

The Liberal Democrat leader of the Oxfordshire City Council, Tim Bearder, said at the time: “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result… This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

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Portland Women’s Sports Bar Boots Patrons over ‘Pro-Women’ Shirts

A group of patrons was ejected from The Sports Bra, a Portland bar that shows only women’s sports, on Sunday for wearing XX-XY Athletics apparel, according to video the group posted online.

Five patrons were removed from the Northeast Portland establishment after a server said other customers had complained about the shirts, according to footage that passed 6 million views on X. Amy Sousa, one of the women in the group, posted the clip.

A server told the group to leave, citing complaints from other customers.

“There are people that are in here that are uncomfortable with those shirts, and so I’m asking y’all to leave,” the server said in the video. “If I have to call authorities to get y’all removed, I will, but I don’t want to do that.”

One patron pushed back. “There is nothing wrong with these shirts! What is wrong with these shirts?” the patron said. The server replied that she had already fielded complaints.

The bar defended the ejection in an Instagram post Monday. It said the group entered wearing “apparel with messages advocating for the exclusion of trans women from sports” and was given the choice to cover the messaging or leave. “To be clear: trans girls are girls, and trans women are women,” the bar said.

XX-XY Athletics is a sportswear brand founded by former gymnast Jennifer Sey that says sports should be separated on the basis of biological sex. The name references the chromosomes of women and men.

Hours earlier, the same group was removed from the Portland Thorns’ NWSL match against the Washington Spirit at Providence Park. A Thorns spokesperson told OutKick the fans were removed for “distributing unapproved materials,” a claim Sousa disputes.

“We did not distribute any materials,” Sousa said. “They are lying about us.”

The confrontation follows a similar incident last month, when the WNBA and the Atlanta Dream admitted security was wrong to make a mother and daughter cover XX-XY shirts worn in support of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, whose ESPN comments opposing “biological men” in women’s sports touched off the debate.

The video drew a split reaction online.

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Seattle Police Chief Invites Widespread Internet Ridicule After Using This Absurd Two-Word Term to Describe Shooters 

A police chief in one of America’s most notorious left-wing cities has decided the word “shooter” is too mean and a more sensitive term is needed to replace it. As one would expect, this is already backfiring.

On Monday, interim Seattle Police Chief Andre Sayles held a press conference to address the three fatal shootings that occurred over the weekend in the city’s Belltown neighborhood.

The Belltown area of the Emerald City has recently experienced a surge in violence. In addition to the shootings, residents have complained about rampant illegal drug use, burglaries, and property damage.

After a reporter asked Sayles what was being done to combat the increase in violence, the police chief gave an unconvincing answer before seemingly inventing a new term to describe shooters.

“(We’re) working with our community response group and our gun violence reduction unit as well,” Sayles said. “Looking at ways to identify individuals that are…trigger pullers in our community.”

Trigger pullers sound like something a toddler would use. But Sayles is apparently so scared of offending criminals that he feels compelled to use this silly, childish term.

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‘Misgendering’ is ‘violent,’ West Chester U. LGBT center says

Free speech groups say recent court cases affirm right to not use someone’s made-up identity

It is “harmful” and “violent” to refer to someone by their true sex, according to a guidance sheet from West Chester University’s “Center for Trans and Queer Advocacy.”

“Misgendering” refers to not using someone’s declared gender, as in the case of a man who claims to be a woman or vice versa. Using the biologically accurate language “can be harmful and violent,” the faculty resource guide states.

Likewise, “deadnaming,” or referring to someone by their real name, “can be quite harmful.”

The guidance sheet, called “Faculty Guide to Supporting Trans & Queer Students,” explains how staff should handle trans and queer students. In the document, it goes over many methods and requests faculty members to become advocates by asking “In what ways have you shown up as an advocate? Inside and out of the classroom?” 

Professors are also encouraged to share their pronouns to “normalize” the practice.

“Consider putting pronouns on business cards and/or on your Zoom name. We have a demo for that!” the document states. The center separately offers other resources, including “Trans Joy” coloring books and guidance on name changes.

The public relations team for the university did not respond to an email sent in the past week. The College Fix reached the transgender center by phone on Aug. 26, but it told this reporter it would need a week to look into him.

 The center has not followed up from that phone call or an email sent Aug. 20, asking how misgendering is violence, if professors should be punished for using the wrong gender (as perceived by the student), and how to balance free speech with gender concerns.

However, several free speech experts said the university is making mistakes by instructing faculty about the harms of not using someone’s declared gender.

 The faculty guide could be seen as a suggestion for behavior but “a policy compelling the use of preferred pronouns and names intrudes on the right to private conscience and, in the case of a public university, violates the First Amendment,” Laura Beltz told The College Fix via email.

Beltz, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said a university could step in if there is a “persistent and targeted use of a student’s non-preferred pronouns or name” if it “amounts to harassment.”

“But absent more, a faculty member’s mere refusal to use a person’s preferred pronouns or name is protected speech,” Beltz said.

She cited the example of Professor Nicholas Meriwether at Shawnee State University. Meriwether “alleged his rights were violated when administrators insisted he refer to a student using particular pronouns.”

As the free speech expert noted, “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that he had a strong First Amendment interest in refusing to use a student’s stated pronouns, because they carried an ideological message with which the professor disagreed.”

Shawnee State, in Ohio, paid out $400,000 to end the legal battle, as The Fix previously reported.

The Independence Law Center described the guide as “Orwellian.”

Chief Counsel Randall Wenger said if “a public university tells faculty that certain words can constitute violence, censorship and punishment can be recast as protection.”

“It should concern every American when a government institution entrusted with higher education uses its institutional authority to pressure students and faculty toward ideological conformity rather than the pursuit of truth,” Wenger wrote in an email to The College Fix.

He said the guidance could be “used to discriminate against students with sincerely held religious beliefs.”

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Stadium Erupts as Florida Brings Back Chant That Was Banned for Years Due to Imaginary ‘Racist’ History

Sanity returned to the University of Florida Saturday when the Gators took on the Florida Atlantic Owls at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Florida.

During the neo-Marxist cultural revolution that was the summer of 2020, everything deemed “racist” had to be purged, regardless of context or logic dictating otherwise. ESPN reported that this included the popular “gator bait” chant, in which fans would extend their arms in front of them and clap their hands together like an alligator seizing its prey.

What exactly does that have to do with race? The university’s president that year, Kent Fuchs, announced racial undertones were a concern because artwork from the late 1800s and early 1900s showed alligator hunters using black babies as bait.

However, Fox News’ Outkick Sports reported that Fuchs had admitted UF’s chant had nothing to do with any of those depictions.

“While I know of no evidence of racism associated with our ‘Gator Bait’ cheer at UF sporting events, there is horrific historic racist imagery associated with the phrase,” he said.

Fox sports writer Zach Dean observed, “Translation: ‘This isn’t racist, but we’re bending the knee to the mob because that’s what everyone is doing right now.’”

So, the president was weak-willed and he caved.

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Ex-Muslim Criticizes Islam, and for Leftists, It’s Time for a Virtue-Signaling Party

Grab your hazmat suit: There has been a severe outbreak of “Islamophobia” in Los Angeles. But don’t worry: the intrepid Mayor Karen Bass is on the job. “Islamophobia,” she declared Friday, “has no place in Los Angeles.”

Bass was late to the party. She made this pronouncement a day after Lindsey P. Horvath, supervisor of Los Angeles County’s third district, denounced the same “vile and dangerous Islamophobia” and added: “It should alarm every one of us: an attack on one community is an attack on us all.” And Horvath was writing two days after the Nexus Project, which combats antisemitism but is apparently branching out, said about the same incident: “This is bigotry, and it should never be met with applause in any room, let alone one at a Jewish event. We call on the sponsoring organizations to condemn this without equivocation.”

Even that was slow on the uptake. It was back on Monday when the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued its marching orders, claiming that the alleged “Islamophobia” was “the same sort of rhetoric that has fueled a rise in anti-Muslim bigotry and violence, including the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego. The sponsors of this summit should apologize, repudiate these remarks, and support justice for all people, here and abroad.”

The problem for Bass and all the others who were piling on and clutching their pearls over this supposedly “Islamophobic” event was that the speaker who had so enraged Hamas-linked CAIR, such that it had to call out the politicians that it carries around in its pocket like so many nickels and dimes, was not some redneck, knuckle-dragging bigot answering a casting call for white supremacists from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Instead, the speaker that inspired all this posturing and virtue signaling was Mosab Hassan Yousef, who is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a cofounder of Hamas. While CAIR and Bass and the rest cry about alleged “bigotry,” they’re apparently hoping that no one will notice that the target of their venom knows what he is talking about.

What Mosab Hassan Yousef said that is driving everyone crazy was this: “And there is no room for Islam dominance, especially here in the United States. Let me be very clear about this. I personally, I as an American, I as a taxpayer, I don’t want Muslims in America. Get the f**k out of the United States. Go back to the s******e where you came from and reform your own countries. This country is perfect and it’s much better without your Islamic belief system. Do I need to be more clear than this?”

Mosab Hassan Yousef grew up as a Muslim, among some of the most committed and knowledgeable Muslims in the world. He has, however, rejected it and embraced Christianity, and now he minces no words in speaking about this violent and supremacist ideology. Many will find his words about wanting Muslims out of America to be too strong, but no one can honestly say they’re based on bigotry or ignorance, or even on dislike of Muslims as human beings. He is speaking this way because he has firsthand experience regarding the brutality, inhumanity, and oppression of Islamic law.

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Gloria Steinem: The CIA, White Feminism, Intersectionality & COINTELPRO

The obituaries have settled into their shape. Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, dead at ninety-two, a life well lived. Somewhere below the tributes, below the aviator glasses and the Ms. covers, a short paragraph appears. Yes, there was the matter of the CIA. But she addressed it head-on, the paragraph says, and besides, she called the Agency liberal and honorable. That paragraph’s doing quiet work. It’s built so the reader forgives and forgets in the same breath.

We’re not here to withhold or grant forgiveness. We’re here to read the ledger.

The facts aren’t in dispute, and they were never secret. From roughly 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, an operation funded almost entirely by the CIA, whose purpose was to send non-Communist American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to blunt Soviet influence. The money moved through a chain of cutout foundations before it reached her. Ramparts exposed the arrangement in March 1967. Steinem didn’t deny it. She defended it, and said that if she had the choice she’d do it again. Take her at her word. The question that matters isn’t what was in her heart. The question is what the state was buying, and what it was destroying at the same time.

Because there’s a second column in this ledger, and the tributes never print it.

While the CIA was underwriting a liberal, gender-first, anti-Communist internationalism through people like Steinem, the same state was running COINTELPRO. That program operated from 1956 to 1971, and its Black nationalist directive, opened in 1967, named the goal plainly in Hoover’s own memos: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the movement. This wasn’t surveillance in the abstract. It was Fred Hampton dead on his mattress in December 1969 in a raid coordinated with the FBI. It was the systematic gutting of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It was Assata Shakur driven into exile and Angela Davis put on trial for her life. Reach further back and the pattern holds. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist who in 1949 theorized the superexploitation of Black women, the triple burden of race and class and sex decades before the vocabulary caught up, was deported by that same state in 1955.

Set the two columns side by side. One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets.

Both statements are literal. This is what we mean when we say the state has a revealed preference. You don’t need to prove that any single person engineered anything. You only need to read what was resourced and what was repressed.

This is where the hagiography’s favorite complaint collapses. Mainstream liberal feminism is often faulted, correctly, for abstracting gender away from class and race, for treating the boardroom ceiling as the frontier while the floor gave way underneath poor and colonized women. The usual explanation is intellectual immaturity, a movement that simply hadn’t yet learned to think in more than one variable. That’s a comforting story, and it’s false. The analysis existed the entire time. It was never missing from feminism. It was carried by the tradition the state was busy dismantling.

Claudia Jones named the interlocking structure in 1949. Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy in 1969 out of SNCC, and the Third World Women’s Alliance built organization around it. The National Black Feminist Organization formed in 1973. The Combahee River Collective, in 1977, stated it as flatly as it’s ever been stated, that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that a politics adequate to Black women’s lives had to confront race and class and sex and sexuality at once. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the framework its legal name, intersectionality, in 1989. None of this was a late correction to feminism. It was feminism’s most rigorous line, developed in real time, by the women the funding never found.

So the class-blindness of the feminism that got the CIA’s money and the magazine covers isn’t an accident of the calendar. It’s downstream of a choice. The currents that insisted on class and empire were the currents the state spent a decade and a fortune trying to break. What remained, what could be safely elevated, was a feminism that named patriarchy but left the ownership question alone. The single-axis frame wasn’t the movement’s growing pain. It was, in part, the movement’s survivors, the ones permitted to survive.

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