Cancelled Canadian Teacher Speaks up

Cheryl was a former Catholic high school teacher for 19 years. She raised concerns about DEI material that she felt was radical in a Union meeting she thought was confidential. She was deemed a racist and a colleague that knew of her pseudonym online reported her. Her online presence had nothing to do with her work nor did she represent or mention her workplace. She was terminated and is currently fighting her regulator who is trying to have her license revoked. Cheryl is a writer, educator and artist.

You can find her on X @ccatherineharv1

Her news letter is ccharvey.substack.com

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[00:00] Russell: Hey everyone. Just before the episode with Cheryl starts, I just wanted to say that I've had some great guests recently and I have some great guests lined up for interviews in the future. Things have been going really great, getting lots of good feedback here and I just wanted to say that if you're interested in more content, you can go to my website, thecanadianconservative.com, where I also write articles on my substack as well. If you enjoy the content and you are interested, I do have subscriber options on my substack and the money that I get from it, I always reinvest back into the show, whether it be paying for my hosting bills or purchasing new and better equipment. So if you are interested in supporting independent media, I greatly appreciate it. But sharing the show, talking about it with friends, those are great options as well. Enough of this, let's get on with the show.

[00:57] Russell: And we're back. Russell here with the canadian conservative podcast. And today in the studio I have Cheryl Gould. Cheryl is a teacher educator, artist writer from Ontario and currently she was fired from her job as an educator in 2021 for speaking up, for speaking her mind about what she thought was policies that were incongruent with the teaching atmosphere. I believe Cheryl taught at a catholic school. She was let go and then her case is currently before arbitration. Cheryl has spoken out about how she is effectively being canceled and the process is pretty insidious. Cheryl, welcome to the show today.

[01:44] Cheryl: Thanks Russell. Thanks for having me.

[01:46] Russell: If you'd like, you just give a introduction to the audience. Tell us a little bit about who you are. Tell us about your teaching career. What was your favorite things to teach? Any memorable moments from your teaching career?

[01:57] Cheryl: I was an english art and media teacher. I liked it and I became a teacher in my early thirties. So I came to it a little bit later after doing a few other things work wise, and I really felt called to the profession as a vocation. It had a bit of a revelation. I was reading a book called the Souls Code by James Hillman one day, and that book is about, it's written by a psychoanalyst and it's about mentorship and how so many of the systems in our society do not really help individuals along because it's more of a factory, right? So it really spoke to me about, at heart, I am really strongly individualistic and I've always felt that freedom and individualism were very core values for me and they're at the very heart of the christian faith as well. And so my movement towards becoming an educator was really tied to my values around individualism and mentorship and being the, you know, being the teacher I wanted. I had a lot of bad teachers, actually, in high school. I had some really crazy ones and some really bad ones in the public school I was in, in West Vancouver. And I kind of wanted to save the kids. I wanted to be the teacher that was able to see them as individuals. And I've found that in my teaching career, that really was my strength. I ended up just naturally gravitating towards working with students. Like students at risk, essentially. That's one of the terms they use. So young people with challenges, life challenges, family dysfunction, histories of trauma. And so I ended up specializing in alternative education, and I did years of teaching in inner city environments of Toronto. And then I did a couple years of department headship. I was a major department head at one of the schools for a couple of years, and then I took a leave, and we actually moved out of Toronto. And while I was on leave from the Toronto Catholic board, I was in the Kwartha board doing some educational leadership in adult education. Again, alternative. In their alternative school program, running programs for adults returning to get their high school diploma. So that's what I did for almost 20 years. I was employed in education for 19 years. And I could tell you so many, like, there's so many heart rending stories because they're, you know, the kids that I worked with were often the most challenged people. You know, people who are really fighting battles that. That sometimes, like, it was astonishing that they were even functioning. You know, some of the stories were really, really seriously difficult. So I was pretty good at it. Like, as you can imagine, that's not necessarily an easy thing to specialize in, in terms of education, but I liked it. I was generally effective, generally popular with the kids, you know, did leadership. I just had a relatively uneventful career until I decided to speak out at a union meeting back in 2021. So, yeah, that's my career in a nutshell. I'm a creative person, so I liked the fact that I could do art and English. I'm a writer, and I love art. Anyway, it was a good job for me, and I enjoyed it, and I would still be doing it, and, you know, but I was ejected because I decided it was more important. I have, as an individualist, I've never been one to just follow and conform for the sake of money or security. I've always been a bit of a risk taker, and I've never made decisions just purely for fun. And, for instance, that's never been at the top of my list. So, yeah, so I was, you know, I feel like I was just following my nature. This is the path that God had laid out for me. And. And so being, you know, being able to see what was going on from the. Ideologically from around the guess, like. Like it had been building for a long time. So when 2020 hit and the BLM movement exploded, things fought pretty crazy in education, and it was with COVID too. Like, all of a sudden, all of our professional development was either Covid related or it was Dei related, and that's all we ever talked about.

[07:28] Russell: I do want to ask a question about that, Cheryl. So, you know, when it comes to doing professional development and professional development, being Dei or Covid or whatever the current trendy thing of the day is to be active about, do you think that's a bit of a cop out from giving real professional development to educational stuff?

[07:51] Cheryl: I don't think it's a cop out. I think it is. How to put it? It's indicative of system priorities, and so system priorities change. When I was an educator and, say, the first decade of my teaching, a lot of the professional development was around evidence based practices. So they were really because, like, education teachers have a lot of autonomy in their classrooms, and so they were really pushing us to use evidence based practices and keep a lot of records and do projects with. Collaboratively with other staff so that we were measuring, you know, like, not just saying, oh, I think I'll do this. Cause I think it works like actually having data that we could show that's like, student achievement is improving because we're doing x, and we can show that because we did pre testing and then we did our lessons, and then we did post testing. And so we did a lot of professional development around that, around experiential learning. Some. Some, you know, there were topics that were big, and. And all of that was just obliterated by social justice topics. And it crept in, sort of. It was well before, you know, BLM exploded on the scene that it was coming. So it has been, you know, BLM was a manifestation of a system priority that was coming down the line for the whole decade before. I remember one professional development session when the light bulb went on for me, that we were dealing with rising Marxism or leftism or whatever you want to call it. There was a professor from York University that was hired, and our entire staff went to a workshop. And we had. Working with kids in the alternative program, we had also focused a lot on resilience. These kids are facing serious challenges. So what can we do to help them develop resiliency and navigate the system, like getting the supports they need from social services and the health care system. The schools are kind of central in bringing those different services together for a student. And so we were involved in helping our kids in all these different ways. This York University PhD in education who ran professional development, it kind of shocked a lot of teachers when she said this. She said, trying to make your students resilient is the worst thing you could do to them and everyone. Well, not everyone, maybe, but a lot of us were like, wait, what? Because that's been such a big focus for us. It's commonsensical, really, that kids who don't have a lot of family support, we ought to be helping them to become as resilient as they can and teach them that they can overcome their challenges. They will become adults who can look after themselves and help them along that path. But she said, no, that's the worst thing you could do for them to try to instill resilience in them, because the problems are systemic, and so the solutions also have to be systemic. And when she said that, I had enough sort of theory in my background and understanding of theory and politics to realize that. She was saying that what we need to do is have a revolution. We need to create, you know, that's woke. Is being awake to awaken, to inject us. Right? So the idea of having to collectivize and fight the system and destroy the system, essentially because it's unfair and systemically racist and replace it with a new system so that in the. I don't know if that was maybe 2015 or 2016, but that's when the was a real light bulb moment for me, that. But I didn't realize how quickly it would progress and accelerate and take over. But at that point, I knew it was coming because we started to hear more things like that in professional development.

[12:53] Russell: Can I ask a question, though, about this professor that did this presentation? It sounds to me like they're kind of, you know, did this person have any history in actually teaching? Like, they. You said that they had a PhD, but have they ever actually taught people before, like, students? Have they ever worked the front lines of teaching?

[13:12] Cheryl: I'm not sure. I don't. I don't. We don't often get a lot. A ton of background on. On the presenters, but she may or may not have. I mean, there are an awful lot of educators getting PhDs in education who do have teaching experience, but they also have an enormous amount of sympathy with all of the materials that are popular in education circles that are foundationally marxist or culturally marxist, you know, not classically marxist. They're not. They don't seem to be. They don't seem to be proposing that we completely ditch capitalism. But what they're doing is very much along the lines of what they're saying globalists are talking about in the great reset. It's stakeholder capitalism. So it is the redistribution of power and wealth through these mechanisms like Dei. And so it is a very far advanced form of socialism that they want and that they've been getting, you know, there hasn't been in Canada much pushback against this. So it's starting to happen now. But at the time that I spoke up, I think people were just shocked because it was hardly controversial. Right? Everyone was just. A lot of my colleagues, not all of them, but a lot of them were just accepting that this is the new ideology. And it's good because it's anti racist. It's good because it's, you know, it's liberating. And I just, you know, I am very much about freedom and individualism, but I just can't believe that people are not seeing the evil of the collectivism in this and the lies, you know, that, you know, for example, with BLM, the fact that their platform was based on deceit and the data didn't support their claims, and the media didn't do their job to expose that, and they were able to become one of the most powerful civil rights movements, if you want to call it that, in modern times. And if anybody, I don't know if you're familiar with Roland Fryer, the Harvard professor who did a study, black intellectual at Harvard, and he did a study to try to. Well, he was researching police brutality and breaking it down by race and in America, and his findings didn't support BLM's claims. And so he replicated, he got new researchers, and he did the study twice because he was expecting to find support for BLM's claims, and he didn't find it. And so he was honest about his findings, and he basically lost his career. Now, I think he's maybe on the way back because the hysteria has kind of subsided. And Dei, the fallout from Dei is really big in the states. Hasn't really started happening here, but with removal of Claudine gay from, like, I think she was instrumental in what happened to him. And. And so you've got people, you know, just wanting to have open dialogue and analyze reality objectively. And that's just not allowed. So. So that's the environment in which I spoke out. I had valid points to make and I didn't say anything. From my perspective, nothing I said should have been seen as outrageous or extreme. But we have become just unwilling to have open discourse. There's just, there's so much both censorship and self censorship going on. I've never been good at that. I've always been kind of an open book and an ideas person that wants to dive in and analyze and dissect and get to the truth of things, even if it's an ugly truth, you know?

[18:04] Russell: Well, the truth is the truth, right?

[18:06] Cheryl: Yeah. And I've always been like the person in my family and, and even in other workplaces, that would be the upstander and would be the person digging a little bit to figure out what's really going on and what's really true, because I do find the truth liberating.

[18:27] Russell: Well, they do say the truth will set you free. I did want, just before we get to the union meeting itself and the fallout that happened after that union meeting, I did want to just kind of mention this and get your thoughts on this. You're talking about freedom of speech and people talking and stating what they truly believe in that Canada. We're very big on safety ism. We're very big on we have to protect the kids, the nanny state sort of thing. And I see that one of the issues that we have is our workplaces make us sign values and ethics contracts with them. That tells us that we can't be political, religious, anything like that in the workplace. You know, I think a catholic school might be an exception, of course, you know, given that they are founded with a catholic basis. And that's something I want to discuss with you afterwards a little bit. But one of the things that I noticed is that our workplaces tell us we can't be political, but yet our workplaces have all sorts of political activities that they want their staff to partake in, whether it be a pride parade, whether it be attending certain functions for certain ideas or certain causes that are political in nature. And there's almost this expectation that you'll go along with those sort of things. And it's really shocking to me. For example, workplaces, most workplaces say that you can't express religious beliefs in the workplace, but yet, you know, your big boss might come out with a thing saying that we're celebrating Ramadan this month or something like that. And, you know, that is a religious cultural practice of certain cultures. And. And I'm all about learning about different cultures and that. But the problem is, is when there's participation that's expected in things. And if you don't, everyone's like, why won't you wear the ribbon? Right? Why won't you partake in this? What's wrong with you? For example, I know a friend of mine works in the workplace where they do smudging. And this person says, well, I don't partake in that cultural religious practice, and they refuse to partake in that. And they've gotten quite a bit of side eye kind of glances and people commenting, saying, well, you know, we're just learning about different cultures. Like, no, you're partaking in one of their practices. And. And that is not part of my belief system. And partaking in that practice was part of the, you know, they. They were doing it. I think it was for the murder, missing indigenous women's day or something like that. And he like said, well, I don't want to partake in this. It's not part of my belief structure, that sort of thing. And there were people apparently that were very upset with him about this. We can't be political and we can't be religious unless it's what our workplace tells us that we have to engage in or that we should be engaging in for the betterment of society or justice or whatever. What are your thoughts on that?

[21:43] Cheryl: Well, I think that the whole critical social justice movement is extremely political. And they have, you know, for example, with gender, by adding gender identity expression, not just sex based rights, but adding gender identity expression to our human rights legislation, they've made it so that they can say it's not political, it's just a human right. And yet queer theory is exceptionally political. Like, it's absolutely political. There is no way around that. If you start to read the theory, you find that it's all about disrupting norms and finding the nuclear family is. Is demonized. There are so many aspects of queer theory that are subversive. It's the whole point of it. Queer basically means subversive against norms. So it's a tricky situation that we're in because the idea that all of these movements, and this includes the anti racist movement, it includes trans queer movement and includes even, like, climate justice, it includes decolonization theory. I mean, all these different branches of critical social justice ideology and theory and movements. These are all radical left wing movements that have been normalized, embraced by our institutions, and presented to us as equivalent to, say, the civil rights movement in the sixties when there was a need for that movement. Right. If there is systemic racism, then wherever it exists, let's identify it and combat the problem on a case by case basis, because we don't have it everywhere. This is the reason the movement's so insidious is, is that it makes claims that the oppression is everywhere. It's baked into the system. No fixing it. You simply have to eradicate the system.

[24:40] Russell: You have to tear it down and rebuild something new.

[24:43] Cheryl: The entire european civilization project is rotten to the core and based on it's foundationally racist. Again, I see that as an incredibly deceitful, manipulative lie. Essentially, that is a lie to say that if you look at the entire planet, human societies all over the planet, and you start digging into. Dig into some data around issues to do with race or sexuality, you will find the most, you know, the most tolerant people. So the people who have expanded their in group preferences the most are the nations that were founded on european values systems, you know, like, especially in the anglosphere, right. That we have, because we have individualism at the core. We've been able to advance to a point when there are surveys done, for example, of the globe, and they're testing attitudes, and you get something like interracial marriage as the topic. You find massively the greatest acceptance in western nations. Same with, you know, mixed neighborhoods, you know, having. Living next to someone who's from a different race or a different ethnic background. And so I look at all the claims they're making about oppression and systemic discrimination, and I think, well, society is not perfect. Absolutely. You know, there's always improvements to be made, but it's simply a lie to say that this one. These ones that are, you know, America, Canada, the UK, Australia, you know, all western Europe, these are not the worst societies. These are actually the most liberated and least oppressive societies with the greatest social mobility. Because ultimately, it comes down to social mobility, right? Like, people want to be free to change their, you know, to create a new story for themselves. They don't want to be in a caste system where they're, you know, like, collectivism makes people. For the most part, collectivism makes people unhappy. It doesn't allow for full expression of the individual's being. So for me, that's a very spiritual issue. So the soul's journey requires that you are free and liberated to make all kinds of different decisions for yourself. Also to have freedom of association, freedom of belief. So we have freedom of religion and freedom from religion, right. There's all these really great achievements that have come out of the western tradition that are being devalued. And I think that's doing our kids a terrible disservice, because what are the radical left wing ideologues offering them instead? I don't see them. I haven't seen any. You know, have we ever had a communist or strongly socialist nation that is really successful? No. We used to point to the scandinavian nations as these amazing examples of socialist success, and now they're struggling even worse than some of the other european nations. There's just, there just isn't a precedent to suggest that we should be following the lead of radical left wing ideologues. There's no historical precedent for it. And there's actually a lot of historical precedents that teach us that we should not be doing that. And in my work as an english teacher, I taught dystopian literature. I taught brave new world, for example, Aldous Huxley. And all of a sudden, I'm like, we're living in it. Like, there's so many parallel. So that was a cautionary tale. You know, it was not a blueprint. And here we are. We're basically living in this weird facsimile of a brave new world with this recent attempt at creating, like, new world order through global governance and making out that it's all for our own good, you know, these massive control systems that they're erecting over us. And then another book I taught was called Persepolis. And that's a graphic novel, and it's about the iranian revolution. And in that book, you have the story of the protagonist as a young girl, and she's growing up during the revolution. She's from a family of leftists. So her family has freedom fighters who fought in the revolution to topple the shah who were on the communist side. And the communists and the Islamists were allied, and they successfully took over. But then the Islamists slaughtered and imprisoned the communists. And again, we can see the same dynamics happening in our society right now. Now, that's not a dystopian novel. That's an actual historical account, and it is autobiographical. But these are the conversations that I would like to have. But you're not really permitted to have such conversations without being considered now like an enemy of the revolution. Essentially, they don't. And this is part of what I do online that has gotten me into so much trouble, is I want to point to the revolution. I want people to notice that this is not a violent revolution, but it's a revolution nonetheless. And we have been, you know, we have been overtaken by left wing ideology. Even our conservative politicians are having trouble fighting against it because they also don't want to be called racists and homophobes and transphobes and islamophobes. So they're using our good nature against us. And it's quite sickening, really, because people's best intentions are being used to subjugate them. That's what I want to talk about and insist on talking about, actually. And, and in my, you know, when I spoke up at the union meeting, should I, should I tell them a bit about that?

[32:14] Russell: Let's move into the union meeting. I'll just summarize very quick. So you taught at a school for kids that have particular challenges, and you taught English. You noticed over the years that this creeping ideology seemed to be slowly working its way into the system more and more. And then everything kind of blew up there and during the BLM. And that kind of brings us to the union meeting that you had where things started to really accelerate for you.

[32:46] Cheryl: So it was during COVID and it was a Zoom meeting. And at the end of the meeting, there's a time at every union meeting when members are invited to bring their concerns forward. So I said, I'd like to speak. And the first thing that I said is I asked the union rep if she knew if we were going to be facing vaccine mandates, because we had gotten emails from the director of education that were claiming the vaccines were safe and effective. And I said that I found that unethical because they're experimental drugs and there was no long term safety data. So he couldn't possibly know and shouldn't be making claims like that. And I didn't know that at the time how that would affect my colleagues. But I know now because I've read some of the evidence that they gave, the testimony that they gave after. By the way, nobody ever said anything to me during the meeting except the union rep. But some of them were so triggered by the, even just by the idea that someone would question vaccine mandates or the safety and efficacy of the vaccines or whether it was ethical to be pushing them on people in a workplace that already triggered people so much that some people had said they had to leave the meeting because that was, that was too difficult for them to hear. So this is what we're dealing with, right? This is the fragility. You know, they talk about white fragility. I would like to talk about left wing fragility. You know, that you can't even make, like, ask a question and make. So then I went on to say we had been gifted a book called. So you want to talk about race? And I held up the book and I said that I didn't think that taxpayer money should be spent buying these books. Every teacher got a copy, and that's very unusual. We, you know, we don't. In all my 20 years of being an educator only. There were only a couple times that the whole staff would be gifted a book, and usually it would be a book that was clearly, you know, some sort of pedagogical value that was clear, was like a teaching manual of some kind that everybody had decided or the administrators had decided they wanted to promote. So very unusual to be all gifted a book. It was chosen by the chaplain, and so the funding would have come from the chaplaincy budget for our multi campus school.

[35:39] Russell: Just. Just one thing, Cheryl, one thing. You're in a catholic school, right? This isn't, like, new. Was it like, one of the new evangelical ones or any of the ones that are, like, the progressive church? This is the catholic diocese, right?

[35:55] Cheryl: Right. In Ontario, we have a publicly funded catholic school system that is parallel to the secular, publicly funded system. So they are catholic schools. This is not like a private christian school, just a part of the catholic system here in Ontario. It's a bit odd that we have it, but that's what we have in Ontario. So I said this book, it was written by an american marxist who supports violent revolution. And I didn't think that the messages and the politics essentially, of the book were suitable for Ontario taxpayers to be footing the bill to promote. I mean, this writer, her next book, just to give you a sense of this woman's, what she cares about and what her work has been about. So after this book, which was a big hit because it came along around the same time as the BLM movement exploded, so it became a bestseller, and it was on school book club lists and was very popular and is probably still being used and taught. But her next book was called Mediocre, and it's basically a screed against white men. The whole book is about, like, her takedown of white men. And then her most recent book is called be a revolution.

[37:32] Russell: Not even hiding it anymore.

[37:34] Cheryl: No. And, you know, she never was. I mean, this book that we were given, it doesn't, like, spell out we need a violent revolution, but it's extremely. It's an indictment of western civilization and white people. And it's a very objectionable book. And it's not even a very particularly well written or intelligent book. And there's one guideline in this book that I think, like, without going into detail about everything that's in the book, this one thing alone, I think, should make it ineligible for being purchased with taxpayer dollars. And that is a guideline that says that when you're talking about race with a group, if the white people in the group are, like, centering their own harm or some, you know, whatever the terminology she used. So basically, if you get pushback, if you get complaints, if you get challenged by the white people in the group, then you should segregate the white group members off on their own in a group of whites only and carry on the discussion without them. Because the purpose of talking about race is the therapeutic value that it confers to the victims of white supremacy.

[38:53] Russell: Oh, wow.

[38:54] Cheryl: Yeah. So I think if a teacher did racial segregation along those lines, they could get in very big trouble. I don't think that it's legal. I know that it's not legal in the states. Now they're starting to make it very clear that the racial segregation that is popular, the affinity groups and whatnot, and the affirmative action campaigns that a lot of organizations have put into play because of DEI, are not legal anymore in the states, or they never were legal, but they've clarified that they're illegal, and we haven't done that yet in Canada. But I think we're going to need to do something like that because racial segregation is happening. So in the school system. I didn't say this in the meeting, but I'll just quickly say it because it relates to unions. I mean, we have a chapter of a teachers union in Ontario where they disenfranchised the white members because they voted to always give the BIPOC, you know, black, indigenous people of color members 50% of every vote, no matter how many of them were voting. So even if there were only, you know, two non white members voting, they would be weighted at 50%. So there's, like, blatant disenfranchisement of white members, and that's just one example. But anyway, I said what I said about the book, and then I moved on to the idea that in our workplace, I was no longer able to have a voice, that I felt really politically intimidated. And the union rep said, well, there's nothing I can help you with. You know, along the lines of your complaints here, you're going to have to talk to the president of the union. And I said, well, the president of the union has the BLM logo in his email signature line. So every time he sends us an email, I see that he has embraced a radical marxist organization, as does our vice principal, our campus administrator. So on both the union side and the school board side, the administrators are putting the BLM logo in their signatures. So I chose to speak at this union meeting because there just isn't any other place I could think of. And I used the term safe space. Right. This was the only safe space I could think of to voice my concerns because the whole system's so politically captured and people like me. And I said, I'm not a far right extremist. I'm not an extremist of any kind, like I used to be a leftist. And I just, I've been pushed rightward. So call me center right, if you will, or maybe I'm more libertarian. Like, I don't even know what I am, but I certainly won't be voting leftward ever again. Yeah, so that's what I said. I said, I'm choosing to speak here simply because I couldn't think of any other place. And so clearly it wasn't a safe space.

[42:25] Russell: Yeah. What happened after that? How did the school administration find out?

[42:31] Cheryl: So when the meeting ended, about an hour later, the union rep called me and she said, you can't talk like that at meetings. And I said, why not? And she said, because I'm getting a lot of complaints. And she was trying to be helpful to her. I don't want to make it sound like she was scolding me. I think she was trying to help me by saying that you're going to get in trouble. So I said, well, what are they saying? And she said, oh, you know, that you're a racist. And I said, but I'm not. And I didn't say anything racist. And she goes, so I know, but that's what they're saying. And you just, you can't talk like that at meetings. So that was on a Friday afternoon. And on Monday morning, I got a phone call first thing from the administration to tell me I was suspended. So the, I didn't know at the time why. And the school board actually never told me. They fired me. That was in April, and they fired me in June. And they never told me who complained or what they said. And I asked many times to know who complained and what they said. But I found out when I was interviewed by the board's investigator that it was my social media activity that they had discovered that was looking to be the main focus of their investigation. So they did ask me a lot of questions about the union meeting, but they ended up firing me for social media activity. Now, my Facebook account was under a pseudonym, not my legal teaching name. And there was one teacher that knew about it because she had been a friend or a friendly enough that I had accepted her as a Facebook friend. And she was. She was the one who shared it with. You know, they were so triggered by my political statements to do with the book and. And the vaccines that they group. They just decided to group report me. So this woman knew that I had edgy political content on my Facebook page, so she shared it with the other outraged teachers so that they could all be outraged together at my far right extremism. And so that's what happened. And so it's what they found me doing on Facebook, which is, was very strongly anti woke and under a pseudonym, not present. Like my bio didn't present me as a teacher, but I did make the mistake of occasionally in my interactions, of mentioning that I was a teacher. So although I wasn't identified in my bio as a teacher and my name was different, I had, for example, around the time that Samuel Petit was beheaded in France. Do you remember the case of the teacher who was beheaded because he showed he was teaching about the Mohammed cartoons?

[45:58] Russell: Controversy was that around the time of Charlie Hebbob?

[46:02] Cheryl: Charlie Hebdo came before and. But that's part of the history of controversy. Right? So this is a topic that of interest to me ever since the Salman Rushdie fatwa. Do you know about that?

[46:17] Russell: Yes, I know about that. Yes.

[46:20] Cheryl: Okay. So this is a really important topic to me because if you're interested in free speech, this is like a seminal subject matter is the fact that the influx of islamic sensibilities in western context has meant that we now basically have to observe certain blasphemy laws. So the western tradition, like, as a teacher of art and literature and media, you know, this is my wheelhouse, that satirical cartooning is a western tradition, political cartooning, and also just freedom of expression and. And the freedom to produce whatever writing you want, you know? So the fact that we have seen many murders occur around by Islamists is of grave concern to me. Not just because it's awful that their, the civilizational values are so different that they would feel justified in murdering a cartoonist or an artist for blasphemy, but the exceptionally weak responses of our leadership. So instead of defending freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, our leaders started just throwing our traditions under the bus and saying, well, to get along, we're just going to have to, you know, not show Muhammad cartoons anymore anywhere on the planet. You know, that that became the. That became the response of our leadership. So. So I would. A couple of times on Facebook, I had come out and said that I'm an educator because I was doing so to stand in solidarity with slaughtered educators or threatened educators because there was a teacher in the UK who's still in hiding and he was threatened for a similar reason. So I. They did a forensic analysis of my Facebook account and they found every place where I had. And then, I mean, we're talking about several thousands of pages of evidence from my Facebook account. And they found every single place. There's a handful of places where I mentioned being a teacher and they found them. And they. So they could say, look, she's not actually hiding her identity. And so this is harmful. So it's all about potential harm. There were no complaints from students ever. There were no complaints from parents. The teacher that knew about my account had known of it for years and never talked to me about it and never complained about it. It was used against me for political reasons because what I said in the union meeting, you know, challenged the orthodoxy. And. And that was handy, right? That they had some. Somebody knew something that they could. That they could use against me. And so that's how it all went down. So I. The union did grieve my termination, but it's three years later and there are no dates set. So I don't know what the regulations are like, how many years they can make somebody wait for resolution of a case like that, but they're making me wait a long time. And I only just found out recently who it was that complained and what they said, because there's a. My current case is with the Ontario College of Teachers. And so they were given evidence by the school board, which was then released in disclosure to me. And so I finally was able to see who complained and what they said, and that was, you know, three years later as well. And I would also like to mention that the teachers that reported me broke the Teaching Professions act of Ontario, because there is a regulation that says if you're going to file an adverse report against a colleague, I think you have 72 hours to inform them of your complaint. And not a single one ever did. And the testimony that I read recently, because it was released to me, I see them saying things, some of my former colleagues saying things like, you know, we were worried about her mental health. She seemed like, you know, to be. Of course, she looked disheveled and she seemed to be, like, unhinged. And, you know, so they, you know, there was no concern for my mental health. There was simply outrage that. That I would say things that were considered sacred. I think that people have to. I think a lot of people don't understand that. A lot of black people also really dislike BLM and anti racism. Like, it doesn't make you racist to reject BLM and anti racism. It doesn't make you homophobic to reject LGBTQia. You know, it doesn't even make you transphobic to reject the trans movement. And in all of the branches of social media, I know of all kinds of dissidents who are of that community. So every time someone who is in the social justice movement talks about the community, that's a very popular word with them. They're not actually representing everybody in the community. They're representing themselves and the people that share their political ideology. And all of the people, you know, you can get excommunicated from trans people or being excommunicated from the trans community because they don't toe the line ideologically. They don't want affirmation only policies for children. They don't want to see children on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and getting surgeries. And they're worried even about adults. Right? Because there's a lot of mentally vulnerable people who are of age, who are getting terribly hurt because of this weird, you know, all of a sudden, the patient is in control of the diagnosis because, you know, and at the same time, they want to say, well, that's. It's not even a mental illness. You know, don't call it a mental illness. And that's. That's in my case, too. So what they found on my social media, I'll just quickly tell you, there's. There's basically three areas in my case, and they're all related to what I call, like, the woke hydra. They're all just different heads of the same woke monster. So one of them is gender ideology, and the other one is anti racism, and the third one is the, you know, anti islamophobia industry, basically. And the fact that we are being. We're kind of living under de facto blasphemy laws, and we're also. That's the one religion that you're not allowed to criticize. So you can. People can say what they want about Judaism and Christianity and, you know, Hinduism, but don't you dare talk shit about Islam, because that will get you into a lot of trouble.

[54:27] Russell: Well, and we've seen people get in trouble because it's definitely, I think, because at the end of the day, the reason why it's so, like, people don't want criticism is because of fear, right? Because there's a real fear that if we criticize this religion that there could be consequences that could be dangerous for people. Whereas every day people. People make fun of Jesus and they make fun of God and they make fun of christian religion. Music, movies, everything. They do it every single day. And Christians just say, yeah, well, it's just another day and day in North America, someone making fun of God, not the new atheist movements, just doing their thing. Right. I did want to ask one. What was the diocese response to this? Did they issue a response or anything like that? Well, what did the diocese say about this? Because there's a lot of turmoil right now in the catholic church and just in Christianity in general. I mean, the Presbyterians are going through right now pretty badly. I think the Methodists. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Methodists just legalized having gay marriage in their church. And that. And that, that's created a lot of division. So did the diocese make any statements?

[55:42] Cheryl: And that's a really interesting question, and I might follow up with them because we knew that the pope was. Over the last few years, he's come out, he is quite a socialist himself, but he's come out quite strongly against the ideological colonization of wokeism. And he did that even before gender ideology became a really big controversy. But he came out extra strong once gender ideology became big controversy. And the Vatican published, I think it's called dignitas infinita. And it's a fairly recent bit of doctrine that essentially rejects gender ideology and affirms a more biblical approach to sex.

[56:46] Russell: Yeah. And if you do reach out to the diocese and they provide a statement, I'd be really interested to see about that, because I find we're seeing more and more christians now. They're saying, okay, you know what? Every other faith is allowed to have their time and place in our organizations, in our society. And that, well, we're going to start being a little bit more vocal about our faith. And I find that as they do that, I'm seeing people. We're seeing people that are getting attacked relentlessly for it. And the SJWs, they liked it when the Christians were quiet. That really worked well for them.

[57:25] Cheryl: Yes. And, you know, Christians are still quiet, relatively. I mean, Christians are being slaughtered in Africa by Islamists, and nobody is talking about it. Right. We are. I don't really understand why we have become so cowed. I. I think that what we're seeing, though, is because of the relentless attacks on Christianity and the degradation of society all around us that people are realizing that we, you know, becoming secular has been ruinous in some ways for us. And that we have, you know, like that, that we are wired. I guess maybe a way you could put it is we are wired for religion. And if it's not the religion of our heritage, other things fill the void. And we're finding that these really damaging ideologies are being given religious importance in people's lives. And for me, the, the war is like this culture war is a spiritual war. I really believe that. And so the upside is that people are returning to their faith because there is this world in Christianity, you're taught to, that Jesus came to give us life to the full, and that's our heritage, our destiny, our gift from God based on his sacrifice. And so if you know that that's part of your faith journey, is that you are meant to have life to the full. And at the same time, we're also taught that we are in the world but not of the world. Right. So it's a really interesting, like, I find Christianity to be very fulfilling in a lot of ways because it's both, there's both a grounding, a physical grounding, and an offer of a beautiful, you know, life of reverence for God's creation while we're here, and a path to walk that is extremely respectful of creation and of the other and this real focus on love and relationship. But on the other hand, we're also gifted, if you will, with the knowledge that we are also a soul and we are of the spirit world and we mustn't forget that. And I don't feel hardened, really by what I've gone through. I think it's brought me closer to God and given me a sense of this is a blessing in a way. I was given, I was given this path to walk. I was always prepared for it. I lived a life that led me here. So I don't regret being one of the people that was able to say, I just won't conform. That's part of our spiritual heritage, too. We are meant to testify and be upstanders and not be afraid of, of not conforming.

[01:01:23] Russell: Well, you know, a couple, couple of quick points I'm just going to make, and then we'll move on to just sort of where things are at now, where you think things are going to go, and we'll kind of wrap up because we are a little bit over time. And I want to be respectful of your time, because I know it's pretty late in Ontario there woke is a religion. That's what I tell people. It's a religion, you know, to believe in transgenderism, you know, is to believe in spirited souls, because the idea is that a soul is placed in your body that doesn't match your body. And so now we need to modify the body in order to have the body match the soul. And that's something that I came to after a lot of discussion and that. And I do believe in that there is mental health, like gender dysphoria, and that's a mental health thing. But I do believe that for a lot of these people, these gender bending people, and that it is a religion, it's a cult. And they. And if you leave the call, you're an apostate. An apostasy is even worse than never even being involved at all.

[01:02:20] Cheryl: And in regards to de transitioners are treated very, very badly and that, you know, that.

[01:02:27] Russell: Because they're apostates.

[01:02:28] Cheryl: Exactly. And people should be paying very close attention to them. They are. Their stories are so powerful.

[01:02:36] Russell: And, you know, I also recently, and I don't want to turn this into like a theological podcast or anything, but I also returned to faith pretty recently as well. I was raised a Catholic. I was raised in the catholic school board system in Ontario many years ago. And I kind of left it like many people do. And then recently, you know, it actually was the church burnings. It was the one that they tried to burn down in Regina and that. And I talked to a friend of mine, Stuart Parker, and he said, well, this is just the fourth iteration of the KKK. It's the church burnings. It's all related back to the clan. But now instead of being done by white supremacists, it's being done by woke. And he's like, go to your local church and see how many white people are even there anymore. So I went to my local church and I noticed that, yeah, most of the white people have fled the church in droves. And that. And the majority of the congregation, I'd say probably 80% of the congregation, is. Is non white. And so really, at the end of the day, they're burning down churches. That majority of people that attend these churches are non white people and they're burning it down to end white supremacy. And it's just, the irony is not lost on me at all from that.

[01:03:50] Cheryl: The indigenous people in Canada, a lot of them are christian and they don't want the churches burned down in their name.

[01:03:59] Russell: So I do want to give the last couple of minutes to, you know, you talked a lot about your journey and, and where you're at now. But just before we, we started the show, you had mentioned, and I'd like to give just one or two minutes here to talk about why you decided to start speaking up, because, you know, quite often with these processes, like Amy ham and other people going through similar things, they want you to be quiet. They don't want you to speak up. They want you to stay quiet while they undergo the process is the punishment type thing. And you kind of brought that up beforehand. And if you wouldn't mind just one or two minutes speaking about that.

[01:04:36] Cheryl: Sure. So, yeah, you're told it can jeopardize your case if you speak. So it's, your voice is being doubly suppressed. I was not really speaking publicly. I did a little bit of writing. So I have a substack. And my substack is mostly quite long articles. And they're not mostly about me, they're about these topics. So there's a very long three part article called not your elders movement, which outlines that the BLM movement is like, it's not Martin Luther King 2.0, it's Black Panthers 2.0. So it's tracing the marxism of the moment, essentially. So I do writing like that. And, and there's a couple essays there that are about me in my case, but not, not much. So I was relatively quiet about the case. But then in the hearings with the Ontario College of Teachers, that are happening now, like, it's almost over. But there will be one more day. The lawyer for the Ontario College of Teachers, in the last day, she said they were doing submissions on penalty and she wants to revoke my license. Very strongly believes that revoking my license is the right punishment. And she's, she said the most important case, the most important precedent case is the case of Frederick Paul Fromm. And this is a case from 2006 and zero seven. And he's a neo Nazi, white supremacist, KKK adjacent guy who used to, I don't know what he's doing now, but he used to organize white supremacist rallies. He was very political, politically active. But he, like me, he didn't get complaints as a teacher. So he was arguing, you know, this is what I do. I'm political in my spare time. And so they did end up revoking him his license. And so the Oct lawyer said this case is essentially the Fromm case 20 years later. But she's worse than he is he was. Because her message of hatred is spread further because of the audience she has online for my writing, right? Because I wasn't doing videos and so on. I was just writing and doing. I do. I do silly little, like, anti woke art pieces and stuff like that. So when she said that and she. She went on about it, and, I mean, the case has been like. I have been depicted as, like, truly monstrous, even though there's evidence, right, in the case where, you know, it's in the agreed statement of facts, where I'm talking about my support for pluralism and individualism and. And, you know, like, everything that I'm railing against is because it threatens those core values of mine. So when. When she compared me to a, you know, said I was worse than a neo Nazi, I just stopped. I stopped caring. I stopped caring because the profession, if the professional regulator is going to lie about who I am just because they're so desperate to get rid of me, I just. I just didn't feel like me being silent was going to be in any way helpful to my case. Because it's all about silencing us, isn't it? And that's.

[01:08:28] Russell: It is.

[01:08:29] Cheryl: And so I just decided at that point, even though I'm camera shy and I really am more comfortable writing than speaking, I decided that I just simply could and stay silent any longer because the system, like we really are. I know I said this before, but I'm going to say it again because we're at the end and I want to emphasize it. We are in revolutionary times. And I am a marked counter revolutionary, essentially, my writing and my speaking and my insistence on speaking in the union meeting and until we recognize. Until Canadians and all over the western world, really, until we recognize this as a revolutionary movement that's being done to us and it's coordinated, until we recognize that we can't really fight back. We have to, you know, we have to be able to identify the causes of all this chaos and radical change that's going on in order to do anything about it. So I was, for whatever reason, I saw this coming in the. I've been watching this space even since, like, you know, the Salman Rushdie fatwa, which was, I don't know, like, I'm not going to say the date, but it was. It was few decades ago. So because of my education, I did degree in literary, in literature, and I studied quite a lot of literary theory. So I'm able to understand the theory. So I can read a paper, a queer theory paper or a critical race theory. Paper or whatever. I know what they're referring to. I know what marxist language is.

[01:10:29] Russell: You understand it.

[01:10:31] Cheryl: I just, I'm just aware. I'm just, for whatever reason, and because I taught dystopian literature and I saw the developments parallel, very much like some of what these visionary writers have warned us about. So for whatever reason, I was just placed in, in the line of awareness of what was going on, ability to speak about it in a way that is not that people can understand. You know, like, I, if I'm given enough opportunity, I can. I have evidence. Like, everything I say is backed with, with evidence and research. I'm. I've always been a bookworm, so I'm just, I just read everything. So I've read. There'll always be an article that I read where I learned something about something else. And, and so I happen to be just able to use my voice to speak out against the critical social justice movement because I understand it. I know where it came from, and I see what it's doing to people, especially young people. And I think it's an absolute evil. I have to say. I think it's evil.

[01:11:45] Russell: Where can people find you? Where can people find your writing?

[01:11:48] Cheryl: So my substack is called the cancelled club, and it's Cece Harvey is my writing name. And I'm on Twitter at ccathrynharveone or Catherine the Great. Catherine's my middle name. And I do have a give send go campaign if anybody wants to donate, because I had to get my own lawyer for the college case. The union is providing a lawyer for the grievance against the school board. The lawyer that they provided me for the college case, he wasn't willing to defend me, so I had to waive my right to have a union. And, yeah, he just said you're guilty, so.