True Lies Podcast

DRAFT TRANSCRIPT

The True Lies Podcast DEMO Transcript 

This script will NOT be read word for word but rather serve as my guide and outline. Think of this draft as my brainstorm. I will update it as I use it to write revised transcripts for each individual episode. Because 'the matter' is on going, I am still fine tuning my approach to narrating over a decade of assaults, attacks and abuse.

 

Let’s begin with an example of the synergy between social engineering and gaslighting that made York University fertile ground for the machinations that became the foundation of what I refer to as ‘the matter’.  This incident does not have any direct connection with the persons and details of ‘the matter’. It is an outside perspective of ‘the matter’ that will help the listener comprehend the machinations of a malicious scheme.

York University’s orientation for teaching assistants was time well spent. I made a list of dos and don’ts. Top of the list was don’t hold office hours behind closed doors. I chose Scott Library as the meeting place to discuss grades, papers, class material etc. Tables in open spaces of the library functioned as my office. Students did not have to search for me in the library. I designated a seating area outside of the library, the spot where we would meet. A wide T-shaped hallway near the library entrance bustled with activity. The richness of a diverse student body made for interesting people watching.

One afternoon, while waiting on a student, I noticed another student of mine gaslighting a group of Muslim students. A Russian Jew, he and his family were recent immigrants to Canada. Based on conversations with him and his class participation it would not be a stretch to describe his politics as conservative. His thoughts about the Arab-Israeli conflict were in a word Zionist.  He broke from a group of his friends to engage the Muslim students manning a table set up to advocate on behalf of Palestinians.

At first he appeared to be listening to a conversation between a female Muslim student and a someone who had stopped by the table.  The Muslim student turned her attention to him. He tossed a flyer that he had taken from the table as if throwing it away. Still willing to engage, she asked him what bothered him about the flyer. He told her the flyer incorrectly referred to Palestine instead of Israel. His tone was condescending. His aggressive body language turned what could have been a conversation into a confrontation. He closed the distance separating him and his interlocutor. Pointing his finger in her face invited an aggressive response from the other Muslim students.

Suddenly shifting his tone, he seemed to step away from the conflict. His purposive de-escalation and the filming of the incident by one of his friends happened simultaneously. Caught on film was a Jewish student being attacked by radical Palestinian activists. The incident became one of many that precipitated an assembly to address, among other things, tensions between YorkU’s community of Jewish and Muslim students.  Representatives from Jewish organizations in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) were in attendance. YorkU officials in attendance leaned into a narrative of tensions that was manufactured, in my opinion, to shut down any organized effort on campus to present a point-of-view that was not pro-Israeli.

 

During the assembly I spoke up. The tide, however, had already turned in the direction of a well-orchestrated transgressive narrative backed up with video “evidence”. [speak: air quotes]  After the assembly, the dean in attendance left the auditorium with a group of Jewish students and representatives of organizations that came on campus to support them. I wrote in an email to the dean’s office that it was not a good look for the dean to appear to be co-opted by Jewish students and outside groups. 

Between the gaslighting at the exhibit table and the socially engineered response of YorkU to outside pressure groups, the entire ensemble of social interactions over a period of months amounted to a coordinated attack. The attack affected the organizational behavior of YorkU. It left Muslim students feeling unthethered from YorkU’s community. The manipulations allowed interest groups to out maneuver free speech, free association and institutional safeguards that make community in a structured learning environment a safe space. YorkU’s official cozy relations with the Jewish students and the outside groups was not malice. It was purblind open mindedness that made the institution susceptible to malicious manipulation. 

Link: Endnotes

Music Segue: Tech N9ne track without lyrics - Fragile/Been Dealt A Hand

Riff - Duration: ( 4.50 Mins ) Perform a monologue or spoken improvisation re: the synergy between ‘social engineering’ and ‘gaslighting’ - notes below. 

Social Engineering Target:
York University’s Organizational Structure and Behavior

Gaslighting: 

Strategy and Tacitic of homophobic and racist crowd sourced attacks 

• Prepare:  gathering background information on target or a larger group target is a part of.
• Infiltrate: establishing a relationship or initiating an interaction
•  Urgently ask for your help: Person X is suffering or being investigated etc., 
• Piggybacking: Appearing to be a representative or affiliated with a legitimate entity or person e.g., school(YorkU), institution (Police), community(Faith)
•  Sabotage: Disrupting or corrupting data to cause harm or inconvenience 
• Creating distrust: Starting conflicts to cause chaos that allows malicious persons to create drama, distrust, embarrassment, etc.  They may make it appear like they are letting you know what is ’really’ going on. 
• Theft: Obtaining valuables like information, access, or money 
• Exploit the victim: once trust and a weakness are established to advance the attack.

TORONTO SOCIAL ENGINEERING RISK RADAR.

• 
  
  Lies: Actions do not match words.
• Fake praise: Positive reinforcement used to confuse
• "Blocking" and "diverting" abuser changes the conversation from the subject matter to questioning the victim's thoughts
• Tell the target or others that the target is crazy. “apparent illness”
• Isolate from friends and family
• Trivializing how the target feels
• Staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the target.
• A Sneaky Kind Of Emotional Abuse
• "Withholding" abuser feigns a lack of understanding, refuses to listen
• "Countering" abuser vehemently call into question a victim's memory in spite of the victim having remembered things correctly
  
  YORKU GASLIGHTING FLOW CHART

Originating in Toronto, Canada, ‘the matter’ is a scheme to attack an opponent while avoiding any direct engagement. This ‘shadow boxing’ scheme weaponizes social engineering and gaslighting as a means of empowering any private individual or entity to infringe on another’s civil rights and liberties in a manner that thwarts judicial review for as long as possible. Specifically designed to prevent the vindication of constitutionally protected rights, the crowdsourcing scheme presented in this podcast as ‘the matter’ channeled/ (channels - on going) homophobic and racist attacks on civil and human rights through third parties. 

Continuing in the United States of America, the scheme relies on violence (control, force and coercion) and intimidation prohibited by the Enforcement Act of May 1870, which proscribed groups of people from banding together "or to go in disguise upon the public highways, or upon the premises of another" with the intention of violating citizens’ constitutional rights. Proscribed behavior and activities perpetrated under the ‘color of law’ by and on behalf of foreign nationals attenuate/ed the letter and spirit of the Enforcement Acts, specifically the Third Force Act, dated April 1871. 

At its core, ‘the matter’ is a manifestation and externalization of inner turmoil experienced by an entitled wealthy female confronted with the realities of a male romantic rival. This Mexican national aided and abetted the enlistment of students registered for my sessions in homophobic entrapment schemes. These homophobic entrapment schemes took place during class. The efforts were designed to eliminate me as a “temptation” and romantic rival by precipitating the termination of my work and study at YorkU and by extension my stay in Canada. 

The integrity of my classroom and the well-being of my students were undermined by someone with the mindset akin to that of an active shooter. A seemingly hyperbolic descriptor, the meaning the phrase ‘active shooter’ conveys is buttressed by the sheer scope of the collateral consequences of ‘the matter’.  A ‘total war’ on my social existence, ‘the matter’ is posited here as an ‘active shooter’ event to convey  the collateral damage inflicted on our body politic viz., civil society, community and state.   The acquiescence of specific functionaries. (e.g., YorkU’s community of Teaching Assistants, Professors, Staff, Students and Administrators etc.) resulted in outcomes that ended the tenure of career staff as well as professional and academic endeavors of fellow graduate students. The target of the effort was one person. Efforts to dismantle social structures and relations that determined my social existence in Canada expanded the scope of damage done to community as well as public and private entities. 

After going on a rampage that killed 8 people at Asian spas in Atlanta, GA, Robert Aaron Long told authorities that he had a “sexual addiction”.  The shootings, he explained, were carried out to eliminate “temptation”. To understand “the matter” you have to wrap your mind around a ‘mass casualty event’ that is different in effect but similar in motivation. Cue ‘affluenza’, a psychological malaise supposedly affecting wealthy young people, symptoms of which include the inability of an individual to understand the consequences of their actions because of their social status or economic privilege.

I have heard of, cra-cra, for example after a friend of mine told his then girlfriend that he cheated on her, she insisted he call the woman, put her on speaker phone and pretend that he was too drunk to recall whether or not they had sex. Somehow, his girlfriend believed she could manipulate and negate his infidelity by gaslighting the women with whom he had sex. Maybe she found it easier to accept the reality that he wanted someone else by getting her romantic rival to doubt the reality of the affair. How vapid must one's reality be to rely on such a scheme for affirmation? 

Enlisting male students to make sexual propositions as part of a quid pro quo was just the beginning. The effort extended to getting other students to enroll in my sessions for the purpose of disrupting class. One of the disruption tactics was asking the same question over and over again with no consideration of the answer given.  The class email was used to send me homophobic messages about what gays like. Homophobic emails alluded to conspiracy theories about the pools being closed because gays had contaminated them with AIDS. The disregard for the welfare and well-being of third party proxies (e.g. students in my classroom) signaled a depraved indifference towards my legal and physical person. The harm and injury caused by efforts targeting me shaped my awareness of an intent to harm and my estimation of the injury intended. 

When I filed a grievance about premeditated hostility in the workplace, it included the sudden rash of unsubstantiated complaints made to my course director. Until I reported it to YorkU security, on my way to and from class along public streets intersecting roadways through campus, random cars of Hispanic looking males would perform casual drive-bys shouting homophobic slurs. A year that began with two sessions of about twenty-five students each ended with me passing off a session that was the target of more aggressive attempts to disrupt the class.

   

‘The matter’ evolved over a period of weeks to include the secret filming of me at gay spa in Toronto. The wealthy female University of Toronto graduate student had at her disposal the level of wealth, access and privilege that transforms kleptocrats in Mexico into ‘thieves of state'.

 

Sarah Chayes - Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

“Chayes leaves her readers in no doubt as to the effect on populations suffering under the authority of these malign networks. While scholars may debate the legal minutiae of understanding endemic corruption as a violation of human rights, the vignettes sprinkled through the book present all-too-perfect expressions of arbitrary interferences with fundamental freedoms, backed up by kleptocratic state power.”

A ‘mass casualty’ event orchestrated on her behalf amounted to an attack on YorkU’s community, Toronto’s gay community and public safety.   This is the level of violence that was applied to corrupt the organizational structure and behavior of public and private entities.

  PLAY➤

SEASON 02: FIRE AND ICE  DURATION: ( ___)

Spoken Word Intro S02 Summary: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

Flaming by Tom L. States

Moths do not consider if they are fireproof or not.

They blame the flame for sizzling and being hot.

Fly little moths fly.

Show ‘ME’ what you got!

If it is not nine lives, it ain’t shit and not a lot.

 PLAY➤

When Sean first told me about the scheme that I now call ‘the matter’ it was how his ‘girl’ friend directed the effort at an individual from her past.  I do not recall what this individual did to upset her. Sean presented the scheme by asking me what I would do if she tried the same with me. At the time, I assumed the conversation was me helping him think about the situation he would be in when he told her about us. In retrospect, as the target of ‘the matter’, the scenarios he presented in the form of ‘if this’ or ‘if that’ were not unlike active shooter drills. I did not grasp at the time that the scheme was based on a strategy that is best described as bombing a city to destroy one building. No matter how I gamed out my potential reaction or response, his retort was, “But who would believe you?”

When friends of mine in Germany and the U.S. began to tell me the same story of being cold called about me, I thought back on my conversation with Sean. My ex, Alex living in Montreal at the time told me that he was cold called and told that I was under some kind of  investigation. The caller wanted to know if there was any violence in our relationship. Based on the caller’s misrepresentations, Alex was under the impression that the person was an official representative of York University. Alex asked me, “Why is YorkU calling and asking about our relationship?” 

A friend of mine in Germany “mistakenly” copied me on a reply to an email forwarded to a person that had contacted him. In the response email, he wrote that as ‘requested’ he was forwarding my communications and would not respond to further communications from me.  Some friends and associates were told I was under investigation, others were told that I was suffering from an ‘apparent illness’. 'Apparent illness’ was subterfuge for a bait-n-switch. It enunciates an amalgam of two tropes: homosexuality is a mental illness, black males are inherently ‘angry’ (volitile). 

In 2017, after allegations about my consumption of alcohol became a part of the profile and assigned pathology, I received a call from someone pretending to conduct a survey about alcohol consumption. This is how sloppy some of the efforts were executed. The person calling could not tell me who was conducting the survey, for what purpose etc. Reluctant even to identify himself, the caller’s tone, cadence and syntax (ebonics) conveyed the impression of a poorly educated black male. Basically, one of the useful idiots enlisted to assist ‘the matter’ really was an idiot. This has been a hallmark of ‘the matter’.

Strife among those orchestrating the scheme eventually broke in my direction. Sean's ‘girl’ friend made a move against another male with whom he was close, and who had been enlisted to assist with the effort directed at me. By the time he reached out to me out of anger or wanting revenge, I had already realized that the scenarios Sean and I had run through that day were no longer what I call an ‘active shooter’ drill but an active attack. If you want an idea of the type of relationship Sean's ‘girl’ friend wanted watch the Netflix movie, based on a true story, Dance of the 41 (Spanish: El baile de los 41). Oy vey!

Remember Sean’s retort as I gamed out what ifs, “Who would believe you?”, well it did not take long for me to figure out that I needed receipts for the transactions carried out as part of ‘the matter’. I am not a ‘god’.  I do not require belief to exist.  ‘The matter’ necessitated ruthless resistance and receipts in the form of documentation. Letters to stakeholders documenting  ‘collateral consequences’ of the matter over the last decade have been my answer to Sean’s question. “Who would believe you?”

'If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.' - Thomas Pynchon

Consider Sean’s question from the vantage point of a popular idiom found in Christian mythology. 

“Ye shall know them by their fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15–20 (KJV)

Sean’s question was not who would believe what kind of tree (matter) it is but who would believe the tree (‘the matter’) even existed. If, however, I hand you the fruit of a tree – an apple for example – you will know what kind of tree it is and you will have knowledge of the tree’s existence.  The ‘collateral consequences’ of ‘the matter’ are the fruits of a scheme that manipulates the reciprocity of social relations as a means of crowdsourcing hate and hostility. The ‘collateral consequences’ of manipulating social interactions, staging encounters, corrupting institutions, masquerading as benign intents etc., are fruits of ‘the matter’. In other words, where social engineering aims to dispute the kind of “tree” (matter) and purposive gaslighting puts in question the existence of the “tree” (‘the matter’), ‘collateral consequences’ allow me to frame my response to Sean’s question in the form of a question. Q: Whose tree is it? A: Mexican kleptocrats (thieves of state).

The phrase ‘mass casualty event’ and ‘collateral consequences’ refer to the same group of people. In the case of York University, ‘casualties’ are students, faculty, and staff .  ‘Casualties’ were straw-wo/men and front persons who did the dirty work and absorbed the brunt of negative consequences.. For example, male students that were enlisted to make sexual advances were ‘casualties’.

Radicalizing some of my male students by recruiting and deploying them as soldiers of a third world debutante’s hate and hostility towards gays degraded their human being. These young male students in their first year of college became casualties and collateral consequences of ‘the matter’. Their enlistment in the scheme was a signal emerging out of the noise as a warning of the malicious intents directed at my physical and legal person. How could ‘the matter’ portend any “good”, if my students were disposable. 

“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

‘Collateral consequences’ signify (a.) persons held to account for their willing or unwilling participation in a homophobic and racist scheme and (b.) a deliberate attempt on my part to create a series of documents providing written evidence of multifaceted transactions that constitute ‘the matter’. 

Some of my students were working part-time to defray the cost of their education. A male student who, as far as I know, did not participate in the scheme worked twenty-one hours a week for United Parcel Service (UPS). Another student, a Muslim, was the first female in her family to attend college. Privileging the effortless expectations of a wealthy female University of Toronto (U of T) graduate student, over the interests, well-being and welfare of working class students at YorkU was a cosmic irony. This is especially true as it pertains female Muslim students who overcame oppostion to their education that was rooted in deeply held religious beliefs. One of whom was caught in the deliberate chaos when it became necessary for another teaching assistant to take over a session because of successful attempts to disrupt one of my sessions by upperclassmen who were recruited to enroll for that purpose. 

Music Segue: Tech N9ne track without lyrics - Fragile/Been Dealt A Hand Duration: ( ___) 

At Bankston Elementary School in Greenwood, Mississippi the foundation was laid for the level of education that has made my ruthless resistance to ‘the matter’ possible and necessary. It was at Bankston Elementary that I was assigned to read Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther. The main character attended Deerfield Academy, a coeducational preparatory school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Before reading this book I had no idea that such a thing as a private secondary school existed. The discovery prompted a curiosity which in turn led to research and me contacting The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

When a wealthy white woman in my hometown learned that The McCallie School was considering my application for admissions she chartered a flight on her private jet to Chattanooga, TN. Failing to convince McCallie to eighty-six my application she used her power (wealth, access, influence) to buttress a campaign against me in Greenwood. I could not get access to my transcript, I was denied access to the testing center where I needed to take the SSAT, rumors began to circulate about my alleged “criminal behavior” (racist trope) etc. After reaching out to Spencer McCallie III, a representative from McCallie’s admissions office flew to Greenwood, Mississippi. We managed to get my transcript released, my retired fourth grade teacher agreed to allow her kitchen to be converted into a designated testing area where I took the SSAT, and it was confirmed with the local authorities that the alleged “criminal behavior” was unsubstantiated. 

What distinguishes this wealthy white woman from the wealthy Mexican ‘girl’, is the level, degree and commitment to using violence (force, coercion, control). No one was enlisted to stalk and harass me. The attempt to retard the organizational behavior of the local school system was limited to slow walking the release of my transcript. State power invested in local law enforcement was not usurped and deployed against me. She did not stage social encounters or interactions to validate racist tropes. Friends, family members and strangers were not enlisted in a scheme to isolate, intimidate or discredit me. She did not attempt to disguise her racism as a faith based initiative. She did not resort to paternalism or feign concern for my mental health and well being as a means of disguising bigotry. The only persons she contacted were those directly involved with or relevant to the admission process.  In other words, there was minimum social engineering and no gaslighting. 

What disturbs me most about ‘the matter’ is the utility of bigotry in priming dysfunctions and social division to achieve personal gain. This process occurred within the ‘male gaze’ as the sexism and misogyny of Weinstein and Epstein functioned to purpose wealth, access and influence as a means of applying control, force and coercion against women. 

'The male gaze' is the relation between male observers and the females being observed. Employed as a means and mode of objectification, male desire fetishizes the body and the social existence (reality) of females in a manner that reduces their human being to 'thingness'.

Within the ‘white gaze’ the previous administration was able to sow and reap discord as a means of obtaining and holding on to power at the expense of persons of color. 

‘The white gaze' based on Franz Fanon’s critical race theory draws upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity of the ‘other’. Fanon infuses that account with a rich treatment of the structures of an anti-Black racist lifeworld. The white gaze fixes blackness, making it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing blackness into itself.

‘The matter’ is an allocation of foreign power (wealth, access and influence) for the purpose of focusing ‘the homophobic gaze’and ‘the white gaze’ on the legal person of a designated ‘other’. It is a framework within which utilitarian bigotry degrades and retards civil liberties guaranteed by democratic institutions and processes. The impact of discriminatory actions taken by individuals and the fact that I am not the first target of this bigoted scheme demands ‘ruthless resistance’. The casual harm inflicted on my students, friends, studies, family, finances, civil society, LGBTQ communty, YorkU etc., and those duped by purposive social engineering is an indicator of the malicious intent at the heart of ‘the matter’. 

The civil rights and liberties that persons of color enjoy were paid for in blood, lives and untold suffering. Our pursuit of happiness should not be subordinate to the whims of intents hostile to the social existence of human beings who bigots designate ‘other’. If my civil rights and liberties can be commandeered, circumvented, set aside, ignored and or negated based on ‘tropes’ that reflect and project what some believe or think about LGBTQ community members (the gay ‘other’) and racialized minorities (the black ‘other’) our social contract is unconscionable. A legal concept, ‘unconscionable contract’ as used here refers to any attempt to separate intents from purposes.

“Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

SEASON 03: THE HOMOPHOBIC GAZE - SEASON INTRODUCTION  Duration: ( ___)

Intro: Duration: ( ___) Set the stage for your episode. Include details that set up your episode's theme. State podcast name, why your show exists, who you are, etc. 

Spoken Word Intro S03: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

 

‘i’ of the storm -by Tom States

 

the ‘i’ of the storm open;
a new path it sets its gaze;
hate that waits lies in wake;
empty souls, its winds take.

the ‘i’ of the storm no tears;
thirst of rage, it’s new strength;
might and hubris, it’s hell bent;
in empty lives, it’s power spent.

the ‘i’ of the storm blind;
a ruthlessness need not sea;
the lines of shores, its fall;
on land no one or nothing too tall.

the ‘i’ of the storm ‘ME’;
gates of its hell swing open;
a gaze ablaze, its rage waves;
fires swirl with fury free.

the ‘i’ of the storm is ‘ME’!

Close your eyes. Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom. An improvised explosive device (in this case an improvised emotional device) goes off. You experience it in slow motion. An apple that was on a nearby desk floats among the debris. It is flying out from the center of the explosion on a calm puff of air. Your perspective is situated in the stillness of the chaos on the parameter of the incident. Focus on the apple. That apple is the subject of this episode. It represents in a manner of speaking ‘the homophobic gaze’. 

Keep the apple in focus. Perfect red, its shape intact, the apple glides through the air as if falling from a tree. Take a bite of the apple. Pull a chuck out of it. Now open your eyes. You see a brown spot at the center of the apple’s white fleshy innards. In it, the other half of the worm you just bit into (in two) oozes a dot of puckered mucus. It is the rest of a critter trying to wiggle free.

 

If you are still with me, we are on that level of reality that extends to the metaphysical, dare I say the existential. It is here that we can begin to comprehend ‘the homophobic gaze’. 

The summary of Season 01 is about the explosion, described as a mass casualty event. The summary of Season 02 deals with the collateral consequences, the outcomes of steps taken to ensure a level of accountability. Fully scripted versions of both seasons were skipped to narrate, in this DEMO, a ‘trigger’ of the explosion. By trigger I mean, a motive force of  ‘the matter’ - ‘the homophobic gaze’. As the narrator my job in this DEMO is to master calm in the chaos long enough to pluck the apple from the scene and offer it to you. If successful, you will be able to sink your teeth into the apple. I want you to feel the sweet juice of this rotten apple flavoring the corners of your mouth.

 PLAY➤

Before I take you into the weeds with an rather academic summary of my understanding of ‘the homophobic gaze’, allow me to oversimplfy the concept - ‘gaze’ - by recounting a short series of personal experiences that will help you frame the concept - ‘gaze’. A group of preschoolers boarded a tram in Berlin accompanied by teachers and teaching aides. One of the little blonde hair blue eyed angels took a seat across from me. I smiled and said hello. Returning my smile with a smile of her own she asked, ‘Wo kommst du her?’ Translation: Where are you from? I answered, Ich komme aus den Vereinigten Staaten. Translation: I am from the United States. 

One of the older German women, who I presumed was a teaching aide, turned to the little girl and said, ‘Nein, Er stammt aus Afrika.’ Translation: No, He comes from Africa. I explained to the woman that I was born in Mississippi. And, that although a descendant of enslaved Africans, I am an American. A debate ensued. 

It is important to note, here, that the little girl used the conjugation herkommen (come from, hail from, come, derive). My answer to her question was correct. The teaching aide used a conjugation of the verb stammen to tell me and the little girl what should be ‘seen’ when looking at me. 

Insisting on the verb stammen (date back to, be descended, descend, arise from, emanate) the aide turned an innocent question into an anthropology lesson that confined my existence to a time, manner and place of her choosing. From the vantage point of anthropology, the ancestry of homo-sapiens stammen aus (date back to, be descended, descend, arise from, emanate) Africa. The designation African-American in the mind of the aide signified first that I was from - Africa- and second where I happened to be born - the United States. Reflecting a historical power dynamic, the boundaries that the aide drew to define my social existence (reality) were arbitrary. 

It was clear to me that her identity as a German was based on the myth that her progenitors sprained from the dirt that later formed the territory given the name of the nation-state - Germany. The aide was even reluctant to entertain a challenge based on the history of migration and the geography of changing borders that could point to a slavic (Central Europe), Prussian or Scandinavia origin for Germans. She was German. In her eyes I was African. 

As an undergraduate studying abroad at the American University in Cairo, Egypt I had conversations with Muslims about my disposition towards religion and faith. After stating that I was not Muslims, without exception the response queried my adherence or affliction with Christianity or Judaism. Both were posited by my Muslim interlocutors as acceptable alternatives to no faith. This open mindedness to other faiths and religious practice made it possible to have a general conversation with Muslims about spirituality. The doorman of my apartment building in Cairo, during one of our discussions about religion and faith, told me that ‘there are many paths to the top of the mountain'.

For many Christians, paths other than Christianity end at a 'lake of fire' or the hell they are willing to make life for the ‘other’. When Christian fundamentalists ask if you believe in ‘God’, they are seeking confirmation of their understanding of a deity, faith, and religion. There is a wrong answer to this loaded question. The wrong answer is a signifier of something wrong with the social existence /human being (da sein) that is not a Christian. 

When a Christian interrogates me about faith and religion my response reflects the fact that the question is an attack vector. Rather than answering no, I tell them that I do not believe that Jesus Christ is my lord and savior. Christ did not die for my sins. There are many mythological ‘god-heads’ other than Jehovah (יְהֹוָהYəhōwā). 

As did the German teaching aide, many Christians react to how I 'see' myself and 'look' at the world by objecting to and challenging my social existence (reality). I become the substance of the things they hope for and evidence of some ‘thing’ -”Christian” that is 'not seen' but for an application of force, control and coercion (violence) that when applied by Muslims indicates 'terrorism'.

In case you have not noticed, I have not used the word ‘gaze’ in either example. I am trying not to use the word to define the word. The closest I will get here is ‘look’ and ‘see’. Most coming out stories have a similar ‘look’ and ‘see’ dynamic. When heterosexual people ‘look’ at the social existence of a homosexual and do not see themselves or a version of life that orients their sense of self and purpose, the person infront of them is often erased. The absence of the familiar and known ignites a process of dehumanization that is the opposite of an example of Christ or a religion of peace. This process reveals the true nature of the person and threat confronting LGBTQ community. 

The German teaching aide, the radical Chrisitian fundamentalists, and the homophobic bigots have in common the presumed omnipresence of their social existence (reality). Within the sum and structure of social relations, they effortlessly expect reciprocal social interactions that confirm and affirm their way of life and worldview. They tend to react with violence (force, coercion and control) when confronted with an ensemble of social relations (community) that contradict their social existence (reality).  When their expectations are negated, the force, control and coercion applied actualizes bigotry. 

Keep all of this in mind, as I explain what I mean by ‘the homophobic gaze’. 

 PLAY➤

“The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage.” 
  The New Puritans By Anne Applebaum -- Illustrations by Nicolas Ortega

DEMO Season 03 Episodes 1 – 5:  The Homophobic Gaze

Opening music jingle & sound effects

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 00: INTRODUCTION

The phrase 'homophobic Gaze' derives its meaning from a dysfunction of the verb -to gaze- that transforms -gaze- into a noun indicating a relation between observer and observed. For example, 'the male gaze' is the relation between male observers and the females being observed. Employed as a means and mode of objectification, male desire fetishizes the body and the social existence (reality) of females in a manner that reduces their human being to 'thingness'.

'The observer' pathologies a category of persons e.g., gays, Asian women, 'blacks' etc. To 'the observer' every member of any given category signifies pathologies assigned that category. For example, all gays are pedophiles, all Asian women are docile, and all 'blacks' are lazy. The bigotry of 'the observer' tends to become actionable when 'the observer' endeavors to discern an assigned pathology as the social existence of persons considered members of a corresponding category. Blinded by bigotry, viz., the assigned pathology, the acts and actions of 'the observer' become the anatomy of hate crimes perpetrated to actualize 'the observed' as imagined, as pathologized. Attempts are made to prescribe as a means of repression and to proscribe as means of oppression. The social existence (reality) of 'the observed' is molested accordingly. 

This podcast DEMO inverts 'the gaze' of homophobic men and women. What you are listening to is 'the abyss' that homophobic people see as LGBTQ existence staring back at them, narrating their voyeurism and testifying against their self-righteous impunity. (Nietzsche) The use of graphic and pornographic language - in pre-planned unscripted riffs - is purposive. Its purpose is to force the inversion of 'the homophobic gaze', to pierce the masquerade of decency and to invalidate moral license permitting attacks on LGBTQ community. The abyss churns with rage, love and fury over a fire of passions. Its endeavors to singe sensibilities with foul language characterizing pernicious adversaries and prudish impunity. 

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center. You find the jewel and it draws you off.” ~ Joseph Campbell

Inverting 'the homophobic gaze' is a practical not a theoretical matter. It requires using the assigned pathologies that blind 'the homophobic observer' as a means to make 'the observer' and the pathology they project onto the social existence of ‘the observed’evident. Here individuated members of any given observed community (assigned category) have the advantage of being both visible and invisible. That is, 'the observed' is 'looked at' but not seen by 'the observer' who can only see what he or she is 'looking for', the pathology they impute. The purblindness of 'the observer' gives 'the observed' both a tactical and a strategic advantage.

Music Segue: Tech N9ne track without lyrics - Fragile/Been Dealt A Hand

Heterosexual bigots invert 'the homophobic gaze' when they take offense at the hint, idea or suggestion that a gay man objectifies and sexualize them the way 'the male gaze' objectifies and sexualize women. The inversion reveals a violent notion of sex. This violent notion of sex posits male sex organs a tool or weapon used to dominate or subjugate. It exposes a latent aggressiveness that masquerades as masculinity and manhood as long as the object of the aggression is female. The mere thought that they would be the object of their own sexualized aggression is violence. 

Heterosexual bigots also invert 'the homophobic gaze' when homosexuality is socially validated by male fantasies of two women having sex. 'Gay' means happy when they are getting off and 'unnatural' when they are getting same-sex 'fucked'. 'The homophobic gaze', 'the male gaze', and 'the white gaze' are first person vantage points of 'the other' that place an emphasis on the "I", "me", "my", and "mine" in social interactions defined by an imbalance of wealth, access and privilege (power). 

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A social discussion of sex and sexuality that is not explicitly about power, domination and subordination tends to be overshadowed by the lurid and the ratchet. Where stories of sex and sexuality in this podcast DEMO are narrated using lurid and ratchet language it is not to tease or to titillate. Here, graphic language represents an attempt to interpret the thoughts of minds that think in simplistic terms about sex and sexuality other than their own.

The lurid and the ratchet muse on homophobia as the estrangement of mind from body in space that nurtures this dissonance when assessing the capacity of the sexual feelings of an 'other'. Homophobic people, especially faith based haters, have sex vicariously without the consent of the LGBTQ people they are trying to 'fuck' over. They imagine themselves in a relationship with a sexualized objectified 'other' that justifies abuses of human rights. They imagine being relevant in the lives of people whose civil rights do not matter when these vigilantes police the social existence of LGBTQ community. When LGBTQ community members do not capitulate to vigilante policing of our social existence, we are presumed culpable for the acts of bad actors that aggress us. Our resistance is interrupted in ways that pathologize us. 

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.” -- Joseph Campbell

The tap root of intolerance explored in this podcast branches out into multiple forms of bigotry. In this podcast DEMO we will focus on race based homophobia and what I call homophobic misogyny.  The working title of the DEMO episodes denotes an attempt to comprehend, from a vantage point informed by the race based 'gaze' Franz Fanon theorized thinking critically about race and colonialism. 

Fanon ponders Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity of the ‘other’. He infuses that account with a rich treatment of socially structured anti-Black racist worldviews. From Fanon’s vantage point, the white gaze fixes blackness, marking it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing blackness into itself.

Music Segue: Tech N9ne track without lyrics - Fragile/Been Dealt A Hand

Reduced to 'thingness', the female 'thing' is an 'other' assessed from the vantage point of 'the male gaze' to affirm male pleasure in a manner that requites male desire while fetishizing women as 'objects' of male lust. From Fanon's vantage point of race based and colonial subjugation, 'thingness' refers to 'blackness' and the mirror reflection of race based "non-being", 'whiteness'. In this podcast series, 'thingness' is the 'non-being' of homosexuals within 'the homophobic gaze'.

The concept, 'homophobic misogyny', dovetails the process of inverting the 'homophobic gaze'. Homophobic misogyny denotes the conversion of pathologies that 'the male gaze' assigns females, into 'the cure' for homosexuality. In other words, reifications of male desire, it is presumed, imbue trangressive pathologies of female bodies and sexuality with power over anyone with male sex organs. In plain English, homophobic males and females expand the scope of 'the male gaze' into an assumption that the sameness of male sex organs engender the same objectification, the same fetishsization and the same reification of female bodies that occurs within 'the male gaze'.

How can the fetishsization of female body parts - 'tits', 'ass', and 'pussy' - not have the same effect and affect on homosexuals as it does on heterosexuals? Invert 'the male gaze' and the answer is partially revealed. Females are presumed susceptible to physiological needs and desire compelled by the fetishized functionality of 'tits', 'ass', 'pussy' and the male sex organ, aka 'good dick'. Fetishized, the male sex organ seduces females and only females in line with the orthodoxy of ‘the male gaze’. In other words, the male sex organ drops 'panties' not 'drawers'. Its seductiveness is negated by masculinity that fetishizes it as a seductive allure of female desire, a magic wand performing a specific trick in a show of masculinity contrived to command female sexuality.   

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 01:  TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION 

Spoken Word Intro S03/E01: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

Perilous by Tom States

Underestimate me at your peril.
I am the tip of spears, the head of arrows.

For the Holy, Hell and faith that cons, blessing and cursing for each soul’s sum.
Roaring forth from the barrow of guns, I can spare the sparrow or be hope to none. 

Taking for all not just some, for futures belonging to what is to come.
Neither the “Saint’ nor the “Sinner” out runs, the fate breathing this fire of suns.

When what’s been sown becomes undone, what remains is the world I am from.
For one and only, a heart beating true to that different drum.

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Transnational Repression: Duration: ( ___) Set the stage for your episode. Include details that set up your episode's theme. Repeat podcast name, why your show exists, who you are, etc. 

Echoes of people going about their business on the street below reverberated in the hollows of the balcony. Toronto’s LBGTQ community was unaware of the malicious intentions of the intruders that checked into the sauna. We sat on the balcony overlooking Church Street. Before he could say a word, I told him that our conversation should be one way. He was the manager who, a few minutes earlier, had confronted the gentleman secretly filming me. Taking a seat, he did not say a word as I explained to him why our conversation should be one-way. 

I told him that the secret filming of me was part of an ongoing assault that included explicit and implicit threats to anyone who shared details about ‘the matter’ with me. Casual acquaintances, friends and former partners who were contacted by persons unknown to me received an iteration of the same threat. Their lives were threatened with the same disruptions that molested my social existence. Intercepted emails sent to me resulted in some of my friends being targeted. 

I appreciated that and how the manager confronted my assailant. There was no need to put his personal life or job in jeopardy. What I needed from him was a robust contemporaneous written account of an assault that was continuing to unfold beyond the secret filming of me. Incident reports were part of SteamWorks Bath Toronto operating procedures. The report pertaining to the secret filming of me one would corroborate my account of an incident occurring as part of a scheme buttressed by plausible deniability. 

I let him know that I was not going to check-out the sauna until the time expired for the room. Then I shared with him what I knew about ‘the matter’. Before inviting the manager to join me on the balcony, I was in my room writing the first draft of a flyer detailing the incident. This was my own contemporaneous written account that I intended to share with LGBTQ community members. 

Writing contemporaneous accounts of acts, actions and activity related to ‘the matter’ had become routine months before the assault on my person at SteamWorks. The secret filming of me was not the first assault on my person inside of SteamWork by assailants ‘the matter’ incited.  Fighting every battle was not an option in the face of adversaries who could evade the rule of law in Canada while allocating significant wealth, access and influence (power) to apply violence with impunity.  I had to wage a war of collateral consequences against force, coercion and control (violence). 

As a practical matter, I had not exited the room while the manager was having a conversation with my assailant right outside of my door. Aside from the filming of me, staging encounters and interactions with me was a means of provoking a reaction that could be used to narrate assaults on my person in such a way that undermined my account of any given assault and my experience of ‘the matter’. 

When LGBTQ community members do not capitulate to vigilante policing of our social existence, we are presumed culpable for the acts of bad actors that aggress us. Our resistance is interrupted in ways that pathologize us.

I did not want my reaction or response to be the narrative of ‘the matter’ or to compete with the flyer documenting the incident and the incident report prepared by the manager. Other than the conversation on the balcony, I did not want to feature in the incident report or the flyer as anything other than the target of violence and aggression. 

SOCIAL ENGINEERING:

Creating distrust: Starting conflicts to cause chaos that allows malicious persons to create drama, distrust, embarrassment, etc.  They may make it appear like they are letting you know what is ’really’ going on.

On my way back to the scene of the incident, my room, I ran into two German tourists. Even under the circumstances, I was happy for the opportunity to speak German. Life goes on even when it is happening to you. I gave them a brief tour of the gym, the health care station where staff offered advice and STD testing. They were especially, begeistert by the elevated DJ booth over a large tiled floor in the middle of shower. SteamWorks was not just a sauna, it was a club, a gym and an event space. I celebrated a birthday in one of the larger rooms that was attended by my gay and straight male friends. The tour ended at the hallway leading to my room.

 

Having heard me in conversation with the German guests, the person responsible for secretly filming me emerged from the room next door to confront them. He spoke with a very distinctive cadence. I had already entered my room and closed the door behind me. My assailant asked the two Germans whether or not they spoke English. Then he asked what we were talking about. Taken aback by his authoritative and intrusive manner they responded in kind. They asked why he was asking and what did it have to do with him.  My assailant elevated his aggression towards them and indicated that he was law enforcement. After telling them that I was under an unspecified investigation, he threatened them with formal questioning as part of the investigation if they did not comply.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING:

Urgently ask for your help: Person X is suffering or being investigated etc.,

Frightened and nervous they capitulated to this impromptu social engineering. They told him that they just met me.  My assailant challenged their response. He did not believe they were telling him the whole story. A little over an hour had passed since I overheard the manager confronting him about the secret filming. The German tourists were telling my assailant that I had only engaged in polite banter with them and made no mention of the incident. Here I have to point out an aspect of ‘the matter’ that inspired these words in the introduction to this episode.

. . .individuated members of any given observed community (assigned category) have the advantage of being both visible and invisible. That is, 'the observed' is 'looked at' but not seen by 'the observer' who can only see what he or she is 'looking for', the pathology they impute. The purblindness of 'the observer' gives 'the observed' both a tactical and a strategic advantage.

Assailants acting to advance ‘the matter’ take for granted that  assaults on my person engender  the emotional response expected or intended. The assumed impact of their actions is a calibration of expectations based on what they perceive within the scope of their ‘gaze’. The assailant accosting the German tourists could not have conceived the possibility that I had the capacity and ability to compartmentalize an experience that I understood in the context of ‘the matter’.  It did not occur to him that from my vantage point he was the one who had committed an unforced error that would change his life. 

Searching for my vulnerabilities he could not appreciate that his actions had provided me with both a tactical and a strategic advantage. While he was talking to the German tourists, I was sitting on the other side of the door, in front of which he stood, transcribing the conversation. The experience was surreal in a way that is hard to convey in words, hence the spoken word intros to episodes of this podcast. He spoke loud enough to be heard in the adjacent rooms. Was he trying to instigate a confrontation with me? Did he think I would assault him?   Maybe he thought I was cowering in fear. Who knows?

If you are attributing my steadfastness while under attack to some kind of Zen enlightenment achieved through meditation and intuition, stop! My frame and presence of mind was not that elevated. To understand how my mind works and worked at the time, ask yourself the same question I did. What is wrong with this picture? Not the little picture posited as the tick-tock of an incident or the misbehavior of assailants. By picture I mean the ‘big picture’, that is, the entirety of the matter as I had experienced it up to any given point or assault on my person. 

Let us consider the big picture. (Chart of Big Picture)

The manager lacked the authority to kick my assailant out of the sauna. His inability to enforce policies that protected the privacy and person of LGBTQ community members indicated an exercise of state authority. Which state? (Tools of Transnational Repression) The exercise of state authority was inconsistent with the professionalism of Toronto Police Services (TPS). An assertion of authority that negated SteamWorks Bath Toronto policies and procedures was consistent with the negation of York University’s (YorkU) policy and procedures and Canadian Union of Public Employees (C.U.P.E) protections. 

Renting the space adjacent to mine in SteamWorks was consistent with the renting of apartment units adjacent to units in which I resided. The units adjacent to mine were used as a base of operation for assailants to stalk and to harass in real time. Coercion and intimidation of the German tourists confirmed accounts of friends and associates who had received cold calls from strangers implying they were affiliated with YorkU. 

Assaulting my person by vicarious and surreptitious means in the sauna mimicked the homophobic honeypot entrapment scheme using my students. Staged interaction and encounters substituted any form of direct communication and interaction with me but were performed for my benefit. For example, my assailant chose to secretly film me and to engage random tourists rather than any direct communication with the target of his aggression. This particular way or method of passive aggressiveness was consistent with stalking and harassment of me and persons I interacted with in class, at gay bars, clubs, in restaurants and neighbors. 

 

In other words, the incident at SteamWorks, unfolding over several hours, was a microcosm of ‘the matter’.  My assailant was a stand in for various individuals enlisted and incited by a crowdsourcing scheme. The affiliation he claimed to the Toronto Police Services (TPS) was illustrative of a broader effort to defraud institutions, private entities, faith communities, LGBTQ community and positions of trust. Patterns of fraud and corruption as a means of ‘legitimizing’ the malicious efforts afford ‘the matter’ vicarious ‘credibility’ especially with persons predisposed towards anti-LGBTQ and anit-black narratives.

 

The incident at SteamWorks was the first time I witnessed, in a holistic way, first-hand how the scheme functioned and incited third parties to dysfunction. It was ‘the matter’ in miniature. The thing that was wrong with the big picture was due to an unforced error that pulled the curtain back. ‘The matter’ was ‘right’ in front of me after so much effort to operate from the shadows. The secret filming of me at SteamWorks exposed the dissonance between the Catholicism Mexican kleptocrats professed and their affinity for the “Devil’s” tools of deception, manipulation and intimidation. 

Remember the question? Whose tree is it? The answer is Mexican kleptocrats. The big picture is third world fascism, rooted in the ethos of Latin America’s ‘dirty wars’ and political corruption. The number and type of people who have been enlisted or corrupted by the scheme are cousins of Americans who, in the millions, have been seduced by the authoritarian impulse that is currently threatening the viability of our democracy. The activity of citizenship is holding the line and protecting the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. 

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There have been a few laugh out loud moments in the process of navigating ‘the matter’. One came when I read the initial reply to my HRTO complaint. Referencing among other things the incident at SteamWorks Toronto, it said that I needed time to recover. This paternalistic faux concern for my wellbeing was accompanied by a request for an abeyance. The abeyance was requested while the stalking and harassment detailed in the complaint continued. A germ of hubris, the paternalism extended to a mention of an ‘apparent illness’. Was the thinking that gay men are weak, fragile sissies poised to crumble under the slightest pressure? There was even the suggestion that my experience as a black person growing up in Mississippi compromised my mental health. They were repeating the mistake made by the assailant that secretly filmed me. Drafting my response to their reply, I considered just sending them a copy of Mother to Son

by Langston Hughes. The poem would have fallen on the deaf ears of Mexican kleptocrats who brought a silver spoon to a knife fight. 

“The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.”
- Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

Social existence (reality) colored by differences of race, sex, gender, sexuality, faith, ethnicity, creed etc is burdened with having to educate people who have the privilege of actions without consequences. When we fail to educate our fellow human beings, they say and do stupid shit with self-rightous impunity. With this “obligation” in mind, I wrote- Link: Communication #2 2018-12-07 - to put my upbringing in the Great State of Mississippi in a context that serves as my vantage point of ‘the matter’. 

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People who find it difficult to comprehend the concept - ‘systemic racism' - tend to romanticize the meritocracy that buttresses notions of ‘American Exceptionalism’. Using the Civil War, a constitutional amendment or civil rights legislation ‘rite warriors’ on the right draw a line in the sands of time beyond which an equality of opportunity is the only circumstance that distinguishes the ‘have’ and the ‘have nots’. On this imaginary level playing field they imagine themselves the home team. Signifying generational wealth, equal pay, access to quality health care and education, every point on the scoreboard has nothing to do with disparities predating the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, civil rights acts or Supreme Court decisions. 

 

Against the historical sedimentation of inequity, if this level playing field were a reality my mother would not have pulled us out of a white public school and enrolled us in a Catholic school, St. Francis of Assisi School.  Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka put the ball in my parents' court and the burden on kids like me who spent more hours, Monday through Friday, with white classmates and white teachers than with our families in the safety of black community. 

Unlike most black parents who allowed their kids to be bussed into hostile territory, my parents were vigilant. When we were sent home with a slip of paper asking permission to put us in special education classes (aka shop class) my parents did not sign. The kids of parents who fell for this ruse were re-segregated into shop class to ‘cast down their buckets’. 

 

Without notice or as I experienced it ‘ without warning’ one of my parents, my father’s father or his brother would show up at Bankston Elementary. I say ‘without warning’ because if I happened to turn around and see one of them, it meant I was not paying attention to the teacher. 

My sisters and I were not among the black kids who were marched from the bus to the showers in the gym where they washed and put on “clean” clothes that had been donated by white families.  White classmates recognizing and pointing out their second hand clothes worn by black students was a ‘thing’ they did to taunt and to tease.There would not have been enough ‘white power’ in Mississippi to handle my mother’s reaction if that had happened to one of her kids. On top of all of this were the daily microaggressions that we shared with asked, ‘How was your day’. 

Fed up, my mother had to decide between the wellbeing of her kids' minds and black bodies and the fate of our ‘immortal’ souls. Six in one, half a dozen in the other, she opted to enroll us in the Catholic school.  It was made clear to us, not to let her father, Reverend Richard Van Watkins know that she had turned our education over to “idol worshipers”.  Initially, the experience was new and exciting. The classroom was as white as the one we left. We were, however, not there long enough for me to comment on any difference between attitudes on race or towards us. 

 

One Friday afternoon, a nun threatened to wash my mouth out with soap. I cannot remember why. My mouth got me in a lot of trouble growing up. Grown folk said I was ‘mannish’. Up to that point, I thought nuns washing kids' mouths out with soap was a myth. The nun and I were standing in the bathroom when she made the threat. I looked over at the remnant of a soap bar on the sink. Then I told her, “That is not going to be enough”. Taken aback by the boldness of my insubordination, she slowed her roll. Before she could recover, I started regurgitating every fire and brimstone condemnation of Catholics that I had heard and could remember. By the time I finished, if not when, she knew why she was going to ‘hell’.  I was sent back to class with my dirty mouth.

 

That weekend I asked to go to church with my grandfather. It meant spending Saturday night at his house and having breakfast with him Sunday morning. The breakfast conversation usually followed the same format. He’d talk about something interesting that happened to him, mention the topic of the sermon he planned to give and eventually get around to asking me how I was doing. For that last part I had come ready. Ratting my mother out outright was not an option. If I appeared to be too big for my britches things could have backfired. 

When he asked how I was doing, I answered with a few generalizations. Annoyed at the lack of specificity, he followed up with specific questions. How is this? What about that? Finally, he asked how I was doing in school. Without telling him that I was a newly enrolled student at St. Francis of Assisi School, I walked him through a typical day. When I mentioned going to Mass any thought he may have entertained that I meant, when referring to a teacher as ‘sister’, a female member of a COGIC congregation vanished. The word Mass put my reference to certain teachers as Sister so-n-so in the proper context. Not a man to lose his cool, he just stared at me. I am pretty sure he saw right through my bull shit pretense. Perhaps my excitement had betrayed my patience. Either way, the deed was done. 

The next morning my sisters and I got up and went to school as normal. That day however, was anything but normal. My grandfather showed up for Mass. He did not say a word. He did not stay long. And, it was our last day at St. Francis of Assisi School. He walked down the aisle pointing us out and to the door.  Over years, my thinking evolved beyond the limitations of faith. Some religions are the practice of twisting logic and reason into a ‘superior’ knot. If untangled by not privileging a single faith or deity, the existence of every single deity is questioned.  As my agnosticism matured into an atheism defined by acknowledging and appreciating all god-myths the same, I stopped privileging one deity or faith over another. 

In other words, I stopped otherizing faiths, beliefs and religious traditions that are not derivations of Judaism. That said, it has been “interesting” to witness and experience how Mexican kleptocrats weaponize their religious bigotry and affiliations with the Catholic church to defraud persons and positions of trust in faith communities as a means of crowdsourcing hate and hostility.

“Ye shall know them by their fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15–20 (KJV)

Everything my grandfather preached, thought and taught about Catholicism and the transgressions of Catholics, these Mexican kleptocrats personify and exemplify. The roots of ruthlessly resisting the means and manner of malicious attempts to molest my social existence are as deep as the South and as old as Europe’s underdevelopment of Africa. They date back to the social existence of enslaved Angolans chronicled in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. 

Catholic priests in Angola not only held slaves, they weaponized the Catholicism of newly converted ‘upper class’ Angolans to coerce support for enslaving persons other than captives of war, prisoners etc. ‘Black skin’ -not social status - as a signifier of human beings who could in the eyes ‘man’ and ‘God’ be commodified was a necessary precursor to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Focused on the physiological function of black bodies, ‘the white gaze’ discounted the humanity of enslaved Africans while assessing the value of ‘white skin’ superior. 

“Race” - the idea that humanity is divided into well-defined groups associated with skin color - is a modern concept that had not fully developed in the seventeenth century. Nor had “racism” - an ideology based on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others and entitled to rule over them. Forever Free: The Story Of Emancipation And Reconstruction By Eric Foner 

Catholic priests in Angola abetted the conjuring of  ‘the white gaze’ by sanctifying the enslavement of human beings on the basis of skin color, that is, of race one hundred and seventy-one years before the notion of race and the phenomenon of racism (1790) socially validated chattel slavery in the United States of America. 

No. I do not hold against the Catholic church my experience of ‘the matter’ any more than I attribute the crimes of Roman Catholic Italian mafia bosses to this sect of Christian faith. Not all Cahtolic flocks are birds of the same feather. As a matter of fact, I have a special place in my heart for the Jesuits. The members of that order, that I have met, remind me of my grandfather's adherence to his Christian faith which I do not dismiss out of hand just because it was used to retard the minds and deliver the ‘souls of black folks’ to chattel slavery. His Catholicism notwithstanding, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whose life is an example of his faith not his religion, has turned out to be a decent guy as Pope.

Consider the path I traveled from the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta to YorkU in Toronto, Canada. The passage from one place to the other was ‘education’ not the ‘underground railroad’. There were many obstacles along the way. The path was beset with premeditated adversities. Then came the homophobic and  race base paternalism of Mexican kleptocrats. Among other transgressions, using my classroom and male students to stage honeypot entrapment schemes, these bigots declared “total war” on my social existence, a fight for which life up to that point had prepared me. 

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 02: “THE BLACK QUEEN’S BOARD”

Spoken Word Intro S03E02: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

Black Queen's Board by Tom L. States

Bit pieces and poor nigga pawns,

making moves as their fates are dusk and their worst days dawn.

The king wants checkmate,

to move things along,

but the black queen wills all pieces gone.

Stepping out of their squares for promises of pay,

pawns stand in what they think is the way.

Like little dogs thinking it is their day,

for them this is a game,

but the black queen don't play.

Beneath their feet in their own shit they will lay,

cause the black queen has the final say.

Patience; but a sword,

holding their petty shit at bay,

until the time is ripe to wreak havoc and to slay.

It does not matter how much mommy and daddy can pay.

All that matters is what they can afford,

when paying to play your futures on this black queen's board. 

 

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Begin Episode 02: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins) 

Do you remember show-n-tell? It was among the highlights of being bussed to a white school in North Greenwood. Show-n-tell allowed me a peek at social existence that was conditioned but not qualified by 'blackness'. The abyss of white community stared back at black students through rainbow colored eyes set in heads filled with thoughts gleaned from dinner table conversations, television and fairytales with dark skin antagonists.  White classmates got a chance to see what mattered in our 'black lives'.

What mattered on the morning a hearing of 'the matter' was staged in Toronto at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) was a show that told the lie of YorkU's role as the party responsible for 'the matter'. Representatives of 'the matter' entered the room with a trolley stacked with boxes, presumably filled with papers. Seated across from me and a good friend who came with me were several people. Most notable among them was a well-dressed and well-groomed white woman.

 

Each party was invited to begin by explaining what they wanted out of the 'meeting'. I say 'meeting' instead of hearing because it didn't follow the policy and procedures for a HRTO hearing. The ‘performance’ was consistent with my experience trying to interface with the grievance process overseen by Canadian Union of Public Employees (C.U.P.E.), meetings with my course director and communications with YorkU officials.

Each time I tried to adhere to the procedures structuring a grievance or conflict resolution process, the effort was stonewalled. Hijacked, the interactions became attempts to make or substantiate allegations. With the exception of members of my department all communication was through email or on the phone. No official representative of YorkU outside of the political science department took a face-to-face meeting with a student and employee who filed several grievances and a HRTO complaint. Given the amount of incoming from all sides, I did not fully access the evasive maneuvering to be part of a façade that allowed functionaries to masquerade as official YorkU representation.

 

It took almost three years to force compliance with HRTO procedures. YorkU - the official entity - eventually produced documents in the discovery process. For all I know YorkU made the documents available consistent with the timeline set by the HRTO. I had to file requests month after month for almost two years to even get a response that addressed the issue. There was no clock to run out so the delays can only be explained as an attempt to put me off with some vain hope that I would give up. Finally, the documents arrived. YorkU had documented details of the matter that required or compelled an official response. Except for a senior security official's racist claims and assertions there was only one other person - to my knowledge - that had a loose affiliation with YorkU. (See Flow Chart).

At the HRTO meeting, the representative alleged I sent threatening emails to my course director. I asked the representative to produce the email. She fumbled through a stack of papers. None of the supporting actors reached for the reams of paper that were rolled in to assist her. Confident that I had not written such an email, I was looking forward to seeing it. 

After a couple of minutes, the representative began to narrate her search for the alleged email. She said that 'the matter' had been hard on everyone as if that was an excuse for such ‘apparent’ high power legal representation to come to the “meeting” unprepared. How long can she carry on? 

I had access to all of my emails. If she did pull a rabbit out of her hat, it would have been interesting to see the wording and syntax of the alleged email. Would it resemble the English as second language (ESL) homophobic emails sent to me? Alas, hers wasn't that kind of show-n-tell. She burst into tears. Her big show-n-tell entrance suddenly became - show your ass. It was the full theatrical water works. I almost had to pinch myself - white woman crying? Really? Was this white female playing into that tired old trope? For all I don’t know she was suffering from an “apparent illness”. 

The alleged threatening email never materialized. The lying and crying game after opening remarks about how much effort was made to “support” me completed a round of real-time gaslighting. 

• Lies: Actions do not match words.
• Fake praise: Positive reinforcement used to confuse
• "Blocking" and "diverting" abuser changes the conversation from the subject matter to questioning the victim's thoughts
• Staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the target.
• "Countering" abuser vehemently call into question a victim's memory in spite of the victim having remembered things correctly
• 
  

One of the emails that I sent my course director was not addressed. After receiving the homophobic email from one of my students -’Casandra’- following the first session of class, I forwarded it to my course director and the other teaching assistants (TAs). In addition to bringing the matter to my course director's attention, I wanted to warn the other TAs that she might be coming their way if she chose to remain enrolled in the class. I was certain that ’Casandra’ would not show her face in my class after sending me such a hate filled and blatant attack directed at my sexuality. 

Much to my surprise, when I called out names to check attendance during the session the following week ’Casandra’ responded “present”. Whereas my male students were enlisted in honeypot entrapment schemes, 'Cassandra’s’ presence was a reminder of the person loud-talking with German tourists right outside of my door at SteamWorks Bath Toronto. Reacting in a way that would facilitate an effort to narrate my reaction as a means of "Blocking", "diverting" and "Countering" the homophobic attack on my person would have allowed the attack to continue in the form of a complaint that narrated my reaction as ‘ hostile action’. 

Consider ‘Cassandra's’ hate filled email from the vantage point of the ‘big picture’ that put the secret filming of me at SteamWorks Toronto in the context of ‘the matter’. If you recall from the previous episode the manager who confronted my assailant about the attack on my person, an attack that also violated SteamWorks Toronto policy, could not ask my assailant to vacate the premises. Furthermore the manager's intervention and authority could not prevent the assailant from harassing the German tourists who were accosted after interacting with me. 

Indicating the ‘authority’ superseding the organizational behavior of  YorkU and CUPE 3903, was a gaslighting trifecta:

• ‘Cassandra's’ homophobic email
• ‘Cassandra's’ return to my class after the attack 
• A lack of response to my email about the attack even after my union representative attempted to address the matter with my course director.
• 
  

For each of four years I chose to work with the same course director. During that time we dealt with a number of issues related to my sessions and students in my sessions. As a graduate student at YorkU he was an active member of CUPE 3903. It never occurred to me that he was being negligent. His silence was consistent with the lack of response to emails that I sent to friends about ‘the matter’. It was also consistent with the negation of SteamWorks Toronto manager’s authority to address an ongoing assault on my person and the harassment of other guests. If I had reacted in a hostile manner to the homophobic attack, I would have put myself in the same position that Muslim students found themsleves after being gaslight outside of Scott Library. Again, my assailants presumed my reaction to malicious activity. 

One person in over a decade of ‘the matter’ asked me how I was doing. A YorkU staff member, her name is Sharon Pereira. If she was instructed not to engage me in conversation about ‘the matter’ or how I was doing, she ignored it. The day she stopped to ask me how I was doing, I had just been asked to leave a month-to-month apartment rental due to phone calls made to the owner of the building. The allegations made in the cold calls were eerily similar - in intent and purpose - to those made in an incident report  I obtained through the HRTO discovery process. The manager of the apartment building apologized profusely for having to ask me to leave but as he put it the owner had grown weary of the cold calls and was concerned about the allegations made against me. A preferred tactic of crowdsourcing hate and hostility, similar cold calls were made to security at retail stores, grocery stores, clubs and restaurants I frequented. When Sharon asked how I was doing, I shared the reason why I was temporarily living out of my office in the political science department. She arranged emergency funding that I used to find a place near campus. 

Sharon Pereira’s humanity was a sign of community at YorkU that had not been negated by ‘the matter’. During the time I lived out of my office, YorkU security officers made their presence felt in a manner consistent with  steps they took to prevent mobile stalking executed by the use of vehicles to follow me to and on campus. The first time I saw Sean’s ‘girl’ friend in-person was in the doorway of my class. Some post graduate students working on their dissertation returned to campus and  took turns spending the night in the lounge outside of my office until I found an apartment. It was a positive experience of YorkU’s community that  put the ‘white’ woman lawyer ‘crying and lying game’ at the HRTO sham hearing in context of ‘the matter’.

The hearing room at the HRTO served the same function as my classroom and the space I occupied at SteamWorks Toronto. It was a space made unsafe by thinly veiled attempts to gaslight, malicious social engineering and direct attacks on my legal and physical person. The crying game was a ‘bizarre event’. The threatening email was a ‘lie’. The paternalistic reference to  financial aid I received was a fake gesture that reeked of the ‘happy slave’ narrative. I chose the HRTO because that entity had a clearly defined process for handling complaints, the process did not lend itself to the endless resources of high price attorneys and it was branded an outside and fair arbiter. Like a house of cards, the HRTO crumpled as the tools of transnational repression systematically dismantled its organizational structure and manipulated its organizational behavior. 

SteamWorks Toronto, York University and the HRTO represent civil society. The unnamed respondent of HRTO complaint (No. 2009-01977-I) was a cadre of foreign nationals who demeaned and degraded civil society. Among other issues raised, the complaint outlined patterns of behavior that retarded reciprocal social relations in targeted communities as a means of violating my civil and human rights. Up to and including the HRTO process, the affected communities were LGBTQ community, YorkU’s community of students and the HRTO’s extended community of legal and human rights advocates. 

 

Mexican kleptocrats, vested in negating my social existence, retard/ed social relations that distinguish state functions in North America from the dysfunction of states in South America. At what point does it become a privilege of personal interest or private passion to reduce persons, entities and functions of civil society to collateral damage as part of a scheme that targets the social existence of an individual? 

Control, force and coercion (communal violence) targeting my social existence have been bullets meant for me. Each coated with an armor-piercing fusion of homophobia and racism tears a hole in our body politic (state, civil society and community). The armor pierced in this ongoing ‘total war’ on my social existence was (and continues to be) the rule-of-law and the order it ensures to protect members of any society from ‘thieves of state’ and the depraved indifference of their self-interest across state lines and national borders.

Today one of the primary motives of ‘the matter’ is an avoidance of accountability and an abatement of consequences arising out of a scheme that continues to position Mexican kleptocrats (and their useful idiots) so far out on a legal limb that their fate is tied to what matters to me. What matters to me are the rights and privileges appertaining my U.S. citizenship as well as the civil and human rights paid for with black and LGBTQ lives and struggle.  There is nothing about what thieves of state (Mexican kleptocrats) believe, believe in or think of themselves that matters to me. Not now! Not ever! #CivilRico

It does not matter how much mommy and daddy can pay.

All that matters is what they can afford,

when paying to play your futures on this black queen's board. 

 

PLAY➤

The documents I obtained through the HRTO discovery exhausted the efficacy of that process. Compromised, the HRTO was no longer a suitable means of seeking redress. Also compromised, York University (YorkU) was not the real ‘respondent’. Manipulation and deceptions characterize attempts to pose YorkU as the perpetrator of a homophobic and racist scheme. Weakness undergirding YorkU’s organizational behaviors had been exploited to defraud its institutional credibility and legitimacy. Targeting individual members of York U’s community susceptible to sympathy or financial incentive, the scheme compromised the integrity of the university’s organizational structure and behavior. 

Sussing through the HRTO discovery documents, I took care to protect the identity of several persons named in the PDF summary of the documents. I went out of my way to highlight and identify persons whose level of cooperation with the scheme defined them as agents rather than targets of social engineering and manipulations. Special attention was paid to individuals who seem to relish in the opportunity to actualize a predisposition towards homophobia and racism.

The HRTO process represented a threat to ‘the matter’. It opened a second front on which Mexican kleptocrats had to maintain the social engineering attack on YorkU. Because of the HRTO process the attack on me and YorkU could not end in a way that allowed those orchestrating ‘the matter’ to avoid suspicion. Not only did the HRTO process deny ‘the matter’ a smooth exit strategy from its entanglement with YorkU, it subverted possible future interactions with YorkU to protect the identity of collaborators. 

Pursuing the HRTO complaint knowing that YorkU was not actual ‘respondent’ allowed me to establish facts and to document patterns of behavior. Using information in the documents obtained, I was able to put together a timeline of incidents, identify the targets of social engineering, match case and file numbers with bogus security reports etc. No amount of time, money or social engineering can negate ‘receipts’, that is, documentation of collateral consequences in the form of letters to stakeholders. Those receipts remain a persistent threat to those yet to be held accountable for their participation in the scheme.

Riff - Duration: ( 0.00 Mins ) Perform a monologue or spoken improvisation about the utility of bigotry  - using transcript chart below. 

Rain, wind, thunder and clouds each have unique characteristics but when they come together they are a storm! 

Racism and homophobia are not the same kind of bigotry. A tangible social structure informed the racism of white parents and teachers at Bankston elementary. Tropes that narrated the inferior intelligence of black people were buttressed by laws, customs, and 'black codes' making it illegal to educate enslaved Africans. In segregated closed societies, dilapidated schools and outdated textbooks used by black high school teachers who had an elementary school education facilitated disparities in measured indicators of intelligence. 

In my home state of Mississippi, tropes disparaging the intelligence of black people narrated intellectual capacity based on race and the effect of tangible structural impediments that created and maintained disparities in academic performance. The racist tropes in Incident Report (IR) 2009-001969 lacked the historical sedimentation of the disparities that enforced the perspective of white parents at Bankston elementary. When white parents expressed concerns about black students lowering the efficacy of classroom instruction, they were saying black people have a lower capacity for learning and acknowledging that the education of their white kids could be dragged into an education gap created by structural and historical impediment engineered by white people to create the disparities attributed to the dysfunction of 'black' minds. 

Segregating as many black students as possible into shop class all day was offensive and defensive racism. When I read in the disclosed documentation, that despite earning an "A" in every graduate course, my grades were characterized as "not good", I was offended as a Southern and a person of color. The casual racism of the trope plagiarized the historical effort that white Southerners put into creating disparities and the struggle of black people to overcome structural impediments. The emotional sensation of reading that trope was dull. It felt as if I was being called a "nigger" by someone who could not or would not enunciate the word. When you have been called a "nigger" by someone who really means it and gurgles it from the back of their throat with a growl that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, the utilitarian mimicking of the stigma adhering the insult lands with a thud.

It is a different insult and form of racism coming from someone using it for its performative value. The indirect target of the racism, I was never meant to see Incident Report (IR) 2009-001969. The incident report was sent to me buried in realms of paper after considerable efforts to sabotage my HRTO complaint and to silence me. The trope was deployed to appropriate lived experiences of racism as a means of jury-rigging (jerry-build) structural impediments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The purpose of the structural impediments was to impede my ability to seek redress for the homophobia that transformed York University into a hostile work and study environment. Racism functioned to facilitate homophobia and to inoculate the bigots that assailed my legal and physical person. 

The audience for this bait-and-switch consisted of YorkU officials susceptible and amiable to racist gaslighting. It was not just my intellect being called into question but perceptions of my capacity for reason. From this vantage point the performative value of the other race-based tropes - the "criminal", the "lazy" and the "angry" - was realized as efforts to undermine my credibility as it pertained to formal complaints about purposive homophobic attacks. Here racism was not an end but a means to an egis for a scheme that crowdsourced homophobia and racism. 

In other words, it was not my capacity Mexican kleptocrats were trying to diminish but rather my ability to seek redress for violation of my civil and human rights. The capacity of YorkU officials and union representatives to function in accordance with anti-discrimination policies and procedures was diminished by the racist tropes in Incident Report (IR) 2009-001969. The race-based tropes were not so much an insult as they were an assault on the organizational behavior of YorkU.

Compared to the blatant lie about my grades not being "good", the accusation that I sent a threatening email to my course director was a 'white lie'. Bursting into tears after failing to produce the alleged email was another performative act. As with the tropes in the incident report, I was not the target audience. Officials of  Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario were the target audience. Disrupting the function of the HRTO was the purpose. It worked. 

Pattern of behavior:

• 
  Stonewalling the Canadian Union of Public Employees (C.U.P.E.) after I initiated a grievance process disrupted the function of that organization. My union rights and membership were effectively negated.
• 
  Racist narratives in the incident report neutralized policies and procedures adopted by YorkU to protect students and employees. Keep in mind that the collateral consequences of violating my civil and human rights were students enlisted to stage homophobic entrapment schemes.
  
  
• The performative crying at the " hearing" was confirmation of a pattern of behavior. Her little show interrupted and disrupted the proceeding. 

This pattern of behavior achieved what white Southerners accomplished through deliberate social structures and violence. It created structural impediments to the exercise and protection of civil and human rights. The structural impediments establishing this pattern of behavior were the dysfunction of C.U.P.E, YorkU, and the HRTO. Short-circuiting reciprocal social relations of community, state, and civil society were attacks on our body politic.

>>>>START Rewrite of insert for section here>>>>

Racism permits a level of precision in the application of force, control, and coercion (violence).  External signifiers of "race" function as a targeting mechanism for the violence of this form of bigotry. The idea of race divides humanity into socially valid groups associated with skin color.   It is easier to discern the race of a human being than it is to be certain when, how, or what kind of violence to apply to social existence based on sexuality. Prejudice  know with enough certainty The modulation of reciprocal social interactions by the bigotry of persons, entities, and processes 

The application of violence (force, control, and coercion) distinguishes one form of bigotry from another. 

NOTE: use examples/prose to illustrate the point 

hate and ignorance visualized

hate and ignorance imagined 

To condition how YorkU officials heard and responded to the racism and homophobia I reported. To determine how YorkU officials interacted with and treated me. To bait and elict presumed behavioral responses to - (a.) sexual overtures from male students (b.) gaslit YorkU official response to reports of racism and homophobia (c.)...

Sidebar: Considering how well Mexican kleptocrats maneuvered around our system of laws and the machinations (other than cash payments) they employed to manipulate third parties to not only to pursue but to protect the personal interests of foreign nationals, what special hell it must be to exist as a citizen in a kleptocracy (Mexico) under the thumb and influence of thieves of state. 

Ruthless resistance is only possible in aspiring democracies with social, economic and political structures susceptible to the rule of law.

>>>>>End Rewrite of Section here>>>>>

The HRTO ‘hearing’ was a sub-area of ‘the matter’. The center of activity related to ‘the matter’ shifted when I relocated to Atlanta. While going through the motions of the HRTO process I worked for iLearn Studios. The company provided supplemental educational services for lower income mostly minority students. In addition to tutoring students, my duties evolved to include scheduling sessions for other tutors, payroll and preparing documentation for review by Atlanta Public Schools (APS). 

Patterns of behavior that I identify as ‘the matter’ were reproduced in Atlanta. iLearn Studios replaced YorkU as the structured learning environment manipulated to crowdsource racist and homophobic attacks. Entrapment schemes that puppeteered adult male college students enlisted tender age students to stage setting for homophobic attacks now focused on pedophile tropes of gay men etc. To supplement my income, I worked for the property manager from whom I rented a living space. I collected rent from his other tenets. 

On the flight from Toronto to Atlanta, I compiled a list of stakeholders with whom I intended to share a summary of ‘the matter’ based largely on the documents obtained during HRTO discovery. LGBTQ organizations in Ontario, Toronto Police Services Board, Canadian Union of Public Employees (C.U.P.E), YorkU graduate faculty, and the Ombudsman of Ontario were among the stakeholders on the list. By stakeholders I mean entities that I had contacted and that represented interest compromised by the impunity of Mexican kleptocrats. For example, the social engineering that afforded the scheme impunity within YorkUs structured learning community nullified the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between C.U.P.E and YorkU. SteamWorks Toronto was also on the list. I wanted to make sure that Steamworks had relevant information should its management decide or need to protect itself from an effort that secretly filmed its guests. 

In an act of retaliation against me for the mass distribution of summaries of HRTO documents, that depraved indifference dismantled "supplemental educational services" for lower-income and minority students. The retaliation that followed my mass distribution of information to persons and entities I identified as stakeholder was an exaggerated and horrific version of an effort at YorkU to prevent me from using the copy machine in the Political Science Department to duplicate flyers detailing the secret filming of me in a gay spa.  As a teaching assistant, I had access to the copy machine. Attempts to pressure staff to deny me access to the copy machine failed. I distributed the copies to YorkU’s LGBTQ community and other stakeholders.

‘The matter’ is not just a harassment and intimidation scheme by proxy.  It is an effort to cut off resources that allow me to subsist and resist.  Income earned working at iLearn Studios was used to pay for the plane ticket to Toronto for the HRTO hearing. A few days before the indirect assault on my person and means of subsistence, I had after work one evening used my work computer to send PDF versions of summaries of ‘the matter’ from the vantage point of the HRTO process. Attacking the framework of the educational services provided by iLearn Studio’s was a new low for ‘the matter’. 

PLAY➤

The term "supplemental educational services" (SES) refers to free extra academic help, such as tutoring or remedial help. Targeting the lowest-achieving students, the program provided students extra help with reading, language arts, and math. A partnership between State educational agencies (SEA) and the U.S. Department of Education the program was administered by independent providers like iLearn Studios. The services were available to eligible students in Title 1 schools before or after school, on weekends, or in the summer.

Available to all students in Title 1 schools, the services were marketed as an opportunity for children from low-income families. However, raising the achievement of the low-achieving students is a challenge faced by parents in the best school with the most money. From my vantage point the program was about opportunity. It provided lower income minority students with an opportunity to overcome the same academic challenges faced by their peers in better schools. The program was not designed to address non-academic factors unique to lower-income and minority students. 

A lower income minority student whose family had to decide between bail for a sibling, school clothes, a notebook and a pack Nr. 2 pencil did not have the benefit of a snack afterschool and a quiet corner in his or her small apartment to do homework. Scheduling in-home tutoring sessions when a parent could be present was too often an impediment. It was better to schedule the sessions at food courts in a mall or at a library. Tender aged students nestled in more stable domestic situations faced the challenge of working class parents who could not be in the house during the hours it most needed to be a home. The best home situation for a student with an above average aptitude had a brick wall in front of high achievement. The brick wall was hard working parents who may not have graduated from high school but were able to provide a safe and stable environment for their kids to take a different path. Unable to help their kids with homework after a certain grade, free extra academic help made a journey down paths not taken possible. 

   

Consistent with my strategy of a ruthless resistance, this attack precipitated, surprise-surprise, yet another mass communication about the SES attack. After a considerable amount of time after the SES services were dismantled, I sent in the form of a postcard to a total of 50 SES stakeholders: U.S department of Education, Georgia Department of Education, Atlanta Board of Education, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).  The header of the postcard had a brief description of the attack above a risk radar that displayed ‘the matter’ as ‘patterns of behavior’. The brief description read:

“A group of lower income minority students in Atlanta, Georgia were felled to the same failures of civil, legal and institutional shortcomings that made students at York University in Toronto play-things and collateral damage of Mexican Kleptocrats wielding State-sponsored privilege. The trigger for the Atlanta based attack was my sharing with YorkU’s community knowledge obtained through a discovery process related to a complaint filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Employing the same strategy and tactics that undermined the education of students at YorkU, U.S. federally funded Supplemental Education Services (SES) offered adolescent students in Atlanta were methodically and surreptitiously dismantled: Emails and calls regarding payroll and documentation required by state auditors were unanswered; computers, education materials and student filed were disappeared; compensation for hours worked never received. As at YorkU, this direct attack on innocent third parties and our civil society was an indirect effort to neutralize one person.” (Postcard)

‘The matter’ is the effort of  persons who have never known hunger, income disparity, hard life choices, or what it is like to stave off despair by reaching inside yourself for something not given. I cannot know what is in the hearts and minds of people whose worldview and belief about their place in the world permits sacrificing the lives of others for the sake of  their social existence. A German concept comes to mind. The German word for this concept is Leitkultur. Leitkultur strikes a chord that harmonizes xenophobia, racism, homophobia and misogyny. The word signifies the opposite of diversity, equity and inclusion. It is the notion that one's values (Catholicism etc.,) or culture (bourgeois or class based decorum) is the blueprint for a healthy life and society. This concept captures the attitude of white plantation protestant plantation owners who controlled and regulated every aspect of an enslaved person's life. After the civil war white skin was the license for any white person to decide where black people lived, how they loved, worked and in lynching cases died. 

Think about it for a minute. A foreign and external locus of control overrides the policies and procedures of a Canadian institution (YorkU). In the process of puppeteering YorkU’s institutional behavior, Mexican kleptocrats negated the safeguards for teaching assistants that had been negotiated between YorkU and C.U.P.E.  The manipulation of reciprocal social relations of YorkU’s structured learning community was an assertion of patrician paternalism. The aim was to actualize racist and homophobic ideations conceived in a set of social relations that are not governed by the rule of law in Canada or the United States. Transgressive power (wealth, access and influence) succeeded in carving out a space above the law in which violence (force, coercion, and control) was applied to privilege a world view and set of values anathema to the activity of citizenship in Canada and the United States.

 

If a group of Muslims allocated power to apply violence as a means of enforcing their deeply held religious views about gays or women, how would you describe it? What would we call it? More to the point, what would we do about it? Why does the answer to any of these questions change when the target of a radical third world fundamentalist mind-set (fascism) is ‘black’ and ‘gay’? The reason is three-fold: religious bigotry, racism and homophobia. If the deity buttressing the self-righteousness is represented by a ‘Crescent and Star’ as opposed to a crucifix, religious observance is posited as radical, extremist, terrorist etc. Tropes rooted in the idea of race are convenient delivery mechanisms for hate and hostility. Signifiers ‘unnatural’, ‘sin’, ‘pervert’, deviant etc., dehumanize gays in a way that socially validates any effort that disregards human rights. The impunity of this trifecta is implied. 

When I hear lower income Mexicans (peasants, lumpenproletariat, 21st century serfs) utter the word “Patron” in a tone that conveys humble submission and respect for the rich and powerful in Mexico I think of Leitkultur. This mind-set was the kernel of the hubris and impunity that resulted in the kidnapping and disappearance of  43 students in Iguala. I believe that this mind-set is the guidance mechanism of the machinations that dismantled "supplemental educational services" (SES) for lower income and minority students in Atlanta. The affected students were worth more than this concept (Leitkultur) and the effort it inspired. 

Think about the Civil War and civil rights struggles that created a convergence of disadvantages and advantages placing tender age and vulnerable children on the cusp of change, progress and better lives. This delicate tension with a past that anchors lower income minority kids in poverty, despair and disparities was released in favor of foreing nationals who are not stakeholders in our democracy. The ‘body politic’ of ‘America’ (of Black America) was cannibalized by ‘the matter’.  An amature wordsmith, I lack the capacity to arrange words in an order that adequately conveys my contempt for people (Mexican kleptocrats, religious extremists etc.,) who are blind to the value of lives they deem lesser than their own. Foreign nationals who raped our ‘body politic’ (community, civil society and state)  just to fuck me degrade the reciprocity of our social relations. 

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 03: ‘EASTER EGGS’

Spoken Word Intro S03E03: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

Into The Breach by Tom States

The darkness from the deep
Emerges from crevasses and creeps
As hopes and dreams of enemies seep

Deepest secrets impossible to keep
Death and destruction they reap
Bowing down to a god, as they grope and preach

Breadth and depth of darkness deep
Souls its depravities reach
The hardest lessons learned in the breach

Love that repairs and teach
Lights the darkness of the deep
Brightest where the truest hearts beat 

Day in, Day out
Wide awake or fast asleep
Again and Again, into the breach 

In the mid-nineties a friend of mine from high school and I started a graphic design software company that we incorporated as Intrepid Systems LLC. A math genius, Sree dropped out of Yale to develop software. I left a job working for the technology group at Salomon Brothers, Inc. One of the concepts that I learned attending technology conferences and from Sree is signified by the phrase ‘Easter egg’.

An ‘Easter egg’ is a bit of code that programmers hide. In video games an ‘Easter egg' could be anything from a secret passageway, a more challenging level of the game, an enhanced skill or a hidden weapon that gives you an advantage.  An ‘Easter egg’ in a software package could be a shortcut to performing a routine task or an add-on to a color palette.

I use the term ‘Easter egg’ to talk about my use of deliberate disinformation. ‘Easter eggs’ allowed me to expose homophobic and racist attacks directed at me. They were an effective countermeasure to crowdsourced attacks.  This remains important to undermining a scheme that  relies on gaslighting as a means of harassment and a method of undermining the level of credibility required to document and to report attacks.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.” ― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Sometimes people hold a core belief about what a designated ‘other’ feels and thinks. That is, they are certain of how the mind of the ‘other’ works, how they feel and what they think about the world and their place in it. When the designated other thinks, feels and behaves in a way that works against the bigots beliefs, the bigot can not accept the social existence or reality that ‘the other’ manifests. Instead . . .

About three months after ‘the matter’ began, it was clear to me that the crowd sourced attacks were based on perceptions about ‘gays’ and ‘sexualized tropes of black bodies’ not my individuated social existence as a black gay man. It was also the case that perpetrators of crowd sourced attack and harassment presumed the outcome of their actions prior to carrying out homophobic and racist attacks. Certainty that this or that transgression would have the desired effect or elicit the presumed reaction resulted in unforced errors that I have been able to document and exploit. 

‘The matter’ evolved as I began to seek redress through legal aid societies, my union, the Toronto Police Services Board, Ombudsman of Ontario etc. If I had to simplify what ‘the matter’ evolved into, over time, I would say a cabal of persons with tangential law enforcement affiliations (e.g. private investigators/security staff by off duty or retired police functionaries, human resources similar to those employed by Harvey Weinstein against women he abused etc.,). A third world proclivity for  gaudy outward representations of power (wealth, access, and privilege) manifested as attempts to associate ‘the matter’ with symbols of the state’s monopoly of violence. 

Extralegal endeavors to control, force and coerce outcomes favorable to foreign privileged interests came to rely upon the imprimatur of operating under ‘the color of law’. To sustain itself, the scheme required an auxiliary of functionaries to dysfunction in the U.S. and in Canada consistent with patterns of behavior that allow Mexican kleptocrats to negate and to override state functions. Unregulated lower-tier paraprofessionals have been given the opportunity to act on homophobic and racist whims. There has consistently been an absence of the institutional oversight and accountability that protects the public from the amalgams of personal bias (e.g. race based, faith based, sex based, sexuality based, ethnic based etc.,)  and state functions. Amalgams of ‘personal bias and state function’ lead to outcomes such as the over policing of black bodies. 

Here are two examples of ‘Easter eggs’ that helped me to identify and to target the crowd sourced attacks and attackers. The first example is from Season 01.  Remember, Season 01 was I skipped to focus on ‘the homophobic gaze’ in this DEMO. Both examples . . .Link: Endnotes

Example 1: 

In a “private” conversation with a former partner who resided in Berlin, Germany, I said in German that Sean used “Crystal Meth”. This was not true. It was deliberate disinformation communicated in a cell phone conversation that was “private”. I wanted to confirm what the level of stalking and harassment indicated. My electronic communications and private conversations were compromised. The disinformation resulted in a physical altercation between Sean and one of my assailants. Sean denied having used “Crystal Meth”. The assailant, a white male, refused to believe Sean. 

Sean's honesty was not questioned because I was a credible source of the disinformation. Confidence in the means of gathering information was placed in the information gathered. It mattered that neither the source nor subject of the disinformation was a heterosexual white male. The exercise of force, control and coercion against Sean’s person was imprinted with the imprimatur of state sanctioned violence when the assailant identified himself as “police” after the altercation he initiated got physical. 

The bigotry of 'the observer' tends to become actionable when 'the observer' endeavors to discern an assigned pathology as the social existence of persons considered members of a corresponding category. Blinded by bigotry, viz., the assigned pathology, the acts and the actions of 'the observer' become the anatomy of hate crimes perpetrated to actualize 'the observed' as imagined, as pathologized. Attempts are made to prescribe as a means of repression and to proscribe as means of oppression. The social existence (reality) of 'the observed' is molested accordingly. 

If you recall, after the person secretly filming me in the gay sauna was confronted by management he invoked his affiliation with Toronto Police Services (TPS).  This pattern was repeated in the physical altercation with Sean when the assailant found himself on the floor.  This was not ‘police brutality’ as much as it was the brutality of policing ‘the other’. It was the brutality of coercing ‘the other’ to confirmed and conform to an imago within the white and homophobic ‘gaze’. The white assailant was trying to bring into focus his ‘white gaze’ and ‘homophobic gaze’. 

Fanon ponders Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity of the ‘other’. He infuses that account with a rich treatment of socially structured anti-Black racist worldviews. From Fanon’s vantage point, the white gaze fixes blackness, marking it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing blackness into itself.

A non-binary black male body can only be seen in the ‘white gaze’ and the ‘homophobic gaze’ in the ways that a person, a human being, a citizen with civil rights and liberties cannot be seen. Keep in mind that the assault on my person was extended to an assault on Sean’s person based on disinformation obtained from a “private” conversation I had on my cell phone with a former partner in Berlin, Germany. The assailant elevated his assumptions and presumptions above the rule-of-law and any consideration for Sean’s human being. Such is the nature of ‘the matter.’ ‘The other’ is as perceived or nothing, a non-being an object within the homophobic and white ‘gaze’. In other words, ‘the other’ is Trayvon Martin walking home with a bag of Skittles before a Hispanic male policed his social existence and extinguished his life.

Example 2: Text

Riff - Duration: ( 2.50 Mins ) Perform a monologue or spoken improvisation on a comparative example of zero sum depraved indifference - Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman - using notes below. 

Trayvon Martin 

(i) 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was followed, shot and killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., on the night of Feb. 26, 2012.

(ii) Trayvon's girlfriend called him again at 7:12 p.m., just moments after having hung up with him. "I think this dude is following me," Trayvon told her

(iii) the girl told ABC News. "And then Trayvon come and said the man was still behind him, and then I come and say, 'Run!' "

(iv) At 7:13, two minutes into Zimmerman's call, he tells the police operator: "S---, he's running."

Zimmerman 

(i) George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who routinely called police to report anything awry

(ii) He was Hispanic and wore a holstered Kel Tek 9mm semiautomatic handgun

(iii) Zimmerman, a man with a history of going after suspects in hot pursuit, and Trayvon, a chronically tardy teenager who liked aviation, was making plans for college and got suspended for having a small empty plastic bag containing marijuana residue.

(iv) "Hey, we've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy," Zimmerman told the police operator. "This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around looking about."

To fully grasp the dimensions of ‘the matter’ imagine if someone or a scheme actively recruited George Zimmerman and pointed him at Trayvon. George Zimmerman would have been recruited in part because he was swayed by the pathologies that bolstered threat assessments of young black males. In other words, Zimmerman’s ‘personal bias’ would have been relevant to his recruitment. As part of the neighborhood watch, Zimmerman presumed for himself the imprimatur of the state’s monopoly of violence (a state function). The state’s monopoly of violence as it was applied by “Zimmerman” to Trayvon’s social existence was a historically calibrated targeting mechanism, otherwise known as the ‘white gaze’. 

To comprehend the ‘white gaze’ of a Hispanic male, think of the ‘gaze’ (white, male, or homophobic) as a relation between the function of sight and the dysfunction of mind.  In other words, think of the ‘white gaze’ as recognizing what a “Zimmerman” thinks of ‘the other’ in the person and social existence of a human being. The person and social existence of a human being is reduced to ‘ the other’, the only ‘thing’ a “Zimmerman” can see. 

As far as Zimmerman was concerned he had a right or privilege to apply force, coercion and control over the social existence of Trayvon. In this instance, the activity of his citizenship implied a correlation with a ‘state function’ (‘color of law’, ‘monopoly of violence’).  ‘The matter’ has been staffed by every “Zimmerman” that could be pointed in my direction and given the task of proscribing behavior and policing activity that undermined ‘the matter’. 

I started using “Zimmerman” as a euphemism after Trayvon Martin was stalked, harassed and murdered by a Hispanic male policing the ‘white gaze’. Four years into managing ‘the matter’ the murder of Trayvon reminded me of Hispanic males yelling homophobic slurs at me on my way to and from class on YorkU’s campus. A ‘Zimmerman’ is also a useful signifier for random strangers, religious bigots etc, that stalked and harassed me in patterns that identify them with ‘the matter’ as I experienced it in Toronto, Buffalo NY, NYC, Atlanta GA, Memphis etc., and places in between.   

Taking note of how ‘the matter’ was staffed through the ethnic and religious affiliations of my assailants, I designated a class of aggressors Catholic ‘Zimmermans’.  ‘The matter’ weaponized a peculiar understanding of religious freedom that is inconsistent with the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. ‘Religious freedom’ is code for a relationship with ‘God’ through which fanatics filter violence against gays, women, and people of other faiths. For example, the sexual violence of pedophile priests filtered through their relationship with the Catholic church operationalized sexual violence. 

On of the Catholic ‘Zimmermans’ pointed in my direction giddily declared an intent to “cure” me of homosexuality. Bless his heart. He was only involved in the scheme because he shared the same faith affiliation as the Mexican kleptocrats who exploited every opportunity to staff the crowdsourced hostility. The synergy between Catholicism and homophobia was no exception. If that branch of the Christian faith focused on their pedophile and rapist priest as much as they vie against conscenting same-sex adults a generation of kids in Ireland, Poland, Latin America etc., would not be adults at the bottom of a liquor bottle or rivers they jump into to end their lives. 

​​Pedophile priests operated at a California school for decades - CNN

The Catholic Church allowed more than 50 U.S.-based clergy to move abroad after facing credible accusations of sexual abuse. Some continued to work with children. - ProPublica

Archdiocese of New York releases list of 120 clergy 'credibly accused' of sexual abuse - NBCNEWS

Participation in the scheme I call ‘the matter’ has revealed the true color of several religious bigots. Making an example of them means establishing a base line that associates risks with their attacks on civil rights and liberties. This is not a magic bullet. It will not usher in an era of world peace. It will, to some degree, disassociate faith based threat assessments of LGBTQ community from impunity. What I will not do after this experience with religious extremists is what the Catholic church does with pedophiles, that is, memory hole the abuse and allow the perpetrators to continue the abuse elsewhere under a cone of silence. 

Allow me to express this sentiment in the language of faith lest I be misunderstood by persons who reify the spiritual. 

(Job 1:6-12) One the day angels came to present themselves before the LORD, Lucifer came with them. Lucifer had to get permission from God to molest Job. Giving yourself permission, from your God, to molest my social existence as part of ‘the matter’ is an invitation to launder your spots and wrinkles. (Ephesians 5:27) I have decided to RSVP. Unlike Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego no one threw you into this fire. (Matthew 4:7) You decided to tempt your God by jumping in the fire. (Daniel 3:16-28) There will be no peace given unto you. (John 14:27)

Another Catholic Zimmerman was one of two landlords that owned and rented housing to lower income black citizens of Atlanta, GA. He employed a number of undocumented Mexican workers. It was clear to me from the get go that my social interactions working for him –collecting rents, showing houses and such – would be catnip for Mexican kleptocrats seeking to prune plausible deniability by staging interactions and encounters.  A white man of Irish descent, he spoke Spanish and was married to a Peruvian woman. In terms of ‘the matter’, his home and work life was a social engineer's dream. A good Catholic, he attended Mass regularly and gave money to the poor when they asked with one caveat. His face lit up with a smile when a local crackhead or homeless black person asked him for a couple dollars. If he was sitting in his pickup truck when the request was made, he would hand the pocket change through the driver’s side window while slowly pulling away from the beggar. Poor and disadvantaged black beggars chasing his pocket change amused him. 

“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15–20 (KJV)

I doubt it took much social engineering to convince him to participate in the matter or to lend his undocumented workers to the enterprise. He did both with a gusto that distinguished him among all of the useful idiots over the years that have participated in ‘the matter’. Like most people who break speed limits when they get out of their lane, hubris got the best of him. His boldness extended to asking me why I don’t forgive the Mexican kleptocrats. Acknowledging and directly discussing ‘the matter’ with me broke the gaslighting protocol that explains why Sean kept asking me but, “Who would believe you?”. 

The gaslighting protocol that he broke dictated the following upon mention of ‘the matter’: 

“Blocking” and “Diverting” – ‘the abuser changes the conversation from the subject (‘the matter’) to questioning the target’s (me/my) thoughts’.

Instead of following protocol he dared to inquire about my thoughts on the subject of forgiveness as it pertains ‘the matter’. When I get around to doing a fully scripted version of this podcast I will tell you how I responded to his breaking the first rule of Fight Club.

 “You do not talk about Fight Club” - with Tom

Understanding that stalking, harassment and other provocations were attempts to elicit reactions that buttressed transgressive narratives, I adopted in the early days of the matter, a policy of not responding to attacks that were not imminent physical threats to my person. 

[Sidebar] This policy was based on a tactic my mother used to discipline her kids. She would say, “I am too angry to beat you right now, but when I calm down I am going to get you.” I would beg, “beat me now”! The seventy-two or so hours it took for her to calm down and come out of a bag on my ass was torture. You never knew when it was coming. But that ass-whipping was coming. That you could “take to the bank” as the saying went. 

Keeping my eyes on “the Prize”, I booked responses to acts, actions and activity that advanced ‘the matter’. I put them on hold. The idea was to stay my hand until and unless I needed a counter offensive that either (a.) had a maximum impact on the persons pulling the strings of useful idiots and proxy patsies or (b.) could disrupt ‘the matter’ by expanding the scope and scales on which resources were spent to advance ‘the matter’ at times I needed cover for some other objective e.g. hiding an ‘Easter Egg’, sending a series of secure communications etc.

 

It was years not weeks or months before I sent the package I had prepared on this landlord and his undocumented workers to the Atlanta field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE). The most egregious of relentless attacks that prompted me to put the package together in the first place occurred in the latter half of 2009, and the first half of 2010. My offensive using the package took place between March 5 -11 of 2018. For over a decade, my mother’s wit has helped me out maneuver individuals that indulged the joy of thinking they were getting free licks. This is the reality that inspired the line of poetry in the poem – “The Black Queen’s Board”. 

“Patience but a sword holding petty shit at bay, until the time is ripe to wreak havoc and to slay.” 

This tactic happened to correspond to a lyric from one of my mother favorite Negro spirituals, “it is your time now, but it will be my time after a while.”

From a dialectical perspective the tactic was to weaponize past collateral consequences as a means of self-defense in the present. By dialectical perspective, I mean operationalizing the concept of the past unfolding into the present and the present into the future. Along this continuum my actions have been guided by the emergence of consistent patterns of malicious behavior.

 

The package that I had prepared included a Google Earth layout of where the undocumented workers were housed. (See Image) It had a sampling of writing explaining the matter taken from an abridged version of my collection of letters documenting collateral consequences. Each submission was accompanied by a Notary Public stamp and signature. (See Image) Under separate cover, I faxed a handwritten note to the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, GA. Among other things it communicated the following:

“A review of the PDF at the link provided below will explain the likely-hood – including the how and why – the undocumented persons brought to the attention of I.C.E. will receive notice and warning about this communication.”

Did I know at the time whether or not Mexican kleptocrats would attempt to obstruct the rule-of-law? No. I knew that my electronic communications were compromised. If you have been paying attention while listening to this DEMO podcast, let me ask, would you bet against their hubris. 

The landlord in question made it on to a list of people that required special attention. He is not alone. Taking note of a name, insignia, photo, address or license plate number etc., is all it takes to start a package for a later roll out in the lives of such individuals . Yes, I have heard Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama’s admonition, “when they go low, you go high”. I love me some Michelle Obama. But! You cannot and should not yield anything to bullies. You do not negotiate with them.  There is no high to go, especially when the bullies are wealthy foreign bad actors operating with impunity on ‘American’ soil. When they go low, you go to the bottom and wait for them. When they come for you, bury them! 

The main reason I took my time - nine years - with the rollout of the I.C.E package was because the landlord and his undocumented workers were not my primary target. This was the case even though the landlord made it on my list for special attention because his actions constituted a threat to my physical person in real time, at the time they occurred (2009-10). A detailed description of the shit he pulled on behalf of Mexican kleptocrats can be found in the collection of letters titled, “An Epistolary of True Lies”. 

Pending the passage of legislation (e.g., H.R.5 - Equality Act), LGBTQ community must niggle the consequences of faith based attacks on our community. One way that I did this was to bring to the attention of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) undocumented persons enlisted to participate in an effort that crowdsourced racist homophobic hostilty. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) enforcing immigration policy, does not address the homophobia of undocumented Mexican persons participating in the crowd sourced hostility of ‘the matter’.   Nevertheless, this creative counter measure to ‘the matter’ was a form of redress. Putting hostile foreign nationals on ice, so to speak, did not set them on the road to perdition. It did set them on a road to a country and social relations more hospitable to its wealthy citizens wiping their ass with the civil rights and liberties of their fellow citizens. In the end, it did not matter what they thought about me. 

“‘America’ love it or leave!” 

PLAY➤

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 04: MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO

Spoken Word Intro S03E04: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

 

‘Wishing Well’ by Tom L. States

 

Be careful what you wish for at this wishing well.

Few wishes granted here silence tolling bells.

 

Be careful what you wish for at this wishing well.

So many of the dreams that in this water fell,

are of souls sold because they were for sale.

 

Be careful what you wish for at this wishing well.

Thirsts for these waters are born in the fires of hell.

 

Be careful what you wish for at this wishing well.

Down here are cast secrets no one dares tell.

 

Be careful what you wish for at this wishing well.

This water on fire were sips of hope now hell.

 

Whisper your wishes and it will yell:

“be careful what you wish for at this wishing well”.

If I missed the bus home from the elementary school located in the white neighborhood of North Greenwood, I had to walk. On that walk home, I lost count of the number of times a white person, usually an old white lady, would notice my presence with a comment punctuated with the word ‘nigger’. Seared in my memory are those occasions when the insults were yelled over the head of a black gardener working on their lawns. The racist comments directed at me as I passed through the lower income white neighborhood, serving as a buffer zone between black and white communities, were even more shrill.

Not once did one of those white people impede my walk home. Nor did they stalk me during any portion of the journey.  None of them followed me home, to the store, to a park, to the library etc.  I cannot say the same for persons of color participating in a scheme that channels hate and hostility by staging encounters and interactions with me.

The elementary school in the white neighborhood of North Greenwood and the classroom was hostile territory. I can recall many instances of being excluded. But, I cannot recall a single occasion of being aggressed in a manner similar to the homophobic attacks directed at me at York University and since. The impact of staged encounters and interactions resulted in the cancelation of one of my sessions and in my having to take a voluntary leave of absence. Most of the males enlisted in multiple homophobic entrapment schemes that took place in my classroom at YorkU were persons of color. Only one was black. The others were white and Hispanic.

 

At Bankston Elementary School in Greenwood, Mississippi the foundation was laid for the level of education that has made my ruthless resistance to ‘the matter’ possible. It was at Bankston Elementary that I was assigned to read Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther. The main character attended Deerfield Academy, a coeducational preparatory school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Before reading this book I had no idea that such a thing as a private secondary school existed. The discovery led to a curiosity that led to research and me contacting The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

My geometry teacher at McCallie was a graduate of Williams College. He reached out to the admission office of Williams College on my behalf. After graduating from Williams College, I worked in New York City while getting my masters at New York University. This path eventually led to York University in Canada where the premeditated adversity of ‘the matter’ manifested as the type and kind of bigotry behind a scheme that enlisted black people, members of the LGBTQ community, strangers, persons of faith, off-duty officers etc., as proxies for the racism and homophobia of a spoiled wealthy Mexican ‘girl’. 

PLAY➤

When I pointed out the homophobic and racist aspects of the gaslighting and social engineering in a series of letters, more of an effort was made to crowdsource homophobic and racist hostility through ‘black’ people and members of the LGBTQ community. This effort to cover the scent of hate and ignorance emanating from ‘the matter’ only exacerbated the bigotry. 

Racism is not an event or incident. Racism is a process in which power (wealth, access and influence) is allocated to apply violence (force, coercion and control) as a means of actualizing ‘the idea of race’ as forms of domination and subordination. Processes are punctuated by moments, phases, stages and forms. Racist events and racist incidents punctuate the process of subordination and domination. 

Allocations of power (wealth, access and influence) determine the aim and purpose of violence (force, coercion and control) at various moments, in phases and at stages in the process of subordination and domination. Comprehending racism as an event or incident obscures the focus that the impact of racism has on social existence.  Enlisting the participation of black people to crowdsource hate and hostility is an allocation of power by proxy to apply force, coercion and control by proxy. Black persons, especially lower income black persons, participating in the scheme may or may not have been paid the price of their smell but they have not been afforded the wealth, access or influence that permits Mexican kleptocrats to operate on foreign soil with impunity. 

All human animals are capable of violence. The type and kind of violence that affects and effects subordination and domination based on ‘the idea of race’ are manifestations of a peculiar historical relation between power and violence. If you separate power from violence in the process of racism you are left with an instance of violence, that is, an event indistinguishable from a general capacity for violence. If you consider the power (wealth, access, and influence) directing hate and hostility through persons of color at me, the violence (force, coercion and control) is racism by virtue of its relation to an external locus of power. Bigotry is violent and violence to the extent that ‘difference’ is an element or relevant factor of reciprocal social interactions. As a part of who I am, my race and sexuality affect my social interactions. 

The intent behind staging encounters and interactions designed to validate the trope of ‘angry black males’ or to evoke the trope of ‘hypersexual black males’ determines the nature of the violence channeled through black people at the target of wealthy foreign nationals. The aim and purpose of the force, coercion and control (violence) is derived from power (wealth, access and influence). Black people, gays, strangers, religious bigots etc., in pursuit of aims and purposes determined by bigotry emanating from an external locus of power (e.g., Mexican kleptocrats) are for all intents and purposes “the help”. 

Skin color, sexuality, familiar relations, faith etc., do not remedy the homophobia and racism at the heart of ‘the matter’. Reducing race, sexuality, familiar relations, faith etc., to a redress for a homophobic and race based scheme expands the bigotry beyond a single target (the ‘other’) of hate and hostility to the reciprocal social relations of community. Homophobia and racism are not branding exercises or public relations initiatives. Homophobia and racism are processes of subordination and domination. 

PLAY➤

Kanye West missed the mark when he reflected on the longevity of chattel slavery by suggesting that at some point it must have been a choice. The implication of his comment was that enslaved Africans chose to be subordinated and dominated by white slave masters. The subordination of enslaved Africans and their domination by persons with ‘white’ skin was a function of the violence (force, control and coercion) used to render persons with ‘black’ skin powerless. 

Kanye may have missed the mark but his aim was true. It is easier to rally nihilistic Negroes against black members of LGBTQ+ community than it is to rally them in support of reciprocal social relations of black community. If what goes on between the ears of black kids incentivized black bigots as much as gay sex, fewer black kids would skip school and more would graduate. This occurred to me while being stalked by “crabby niggas” as I passed a school to prison pipeline in Whitehaven (Memphis). Reading a news article about a young black girl kidnapped and raped on her way to school, I pondered what her fate would have been if the eyes on me where watching out for her. Too often the well-being of tender age black children competes with ‘nigga shit’. If gun violence was policed as enthusiastically as the social existence of gay black men and women, imagine the cooperation with law enforcement and the black lives that could be saved. ‘The matter’ has demonstrated how sanctified  bigotry and a few MX$ pesos can price black lives below the market value of black bodies brought and sold during slavery. It is easier to take the slave out of chattel than getting the chattel out of the descendants of formerly enslaved persons. Black community is beset by the miseducated backwards “Country” Negro who only reaches above his station in life to pull another person of color down to his level. This is the essence of what the phrase “Crabby Niggas” signifies.

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

- Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

[TEASER - START]  This DEMO uses a broad brush to portray these individuals (‘crabby niggas’). Once I have mastered the technical aspects of producing a podcast, I will take the gloves off and give these fools the full treatment. In the fully scripted version of this podcast DEMO, I will do an autopsy on the lives and families of  African-Americans who shit (‘nigga shit’) on the black experience and black community. I will start with the “Afrian-Americans (‘crabby niggas) mentioned in this communication.

  Dogwood Elementary-Germantown,TN 

The autopsy will explore the cosmic irony of being harassed during the era of ‘bussing’ in Greenwood, MS (1970s) by white racist and harassed by (sanctified black bigots) African-Americans (2018-9) while in carline dropping off two African-American kids at a predominantly white school in the upper income neighborhood of Germantown, TN. I am considering doing an in-depth mini series that focuses on each African-American that thought they had something to contribute to ‘the matter’. [TEASER- END]

PLAY➤

The longevity of chattel slavery was a function of the power (wealth, access and privilege) allocated to apply violence on the basis of ‘the idea of race’. The prime directive of the ‘slave master’ and the slave mode of production was the acquisition and maintenance of wealth, access and privilege (power).  The motive force of the slave’s existence was a form of survival that depended on producing and reproducing wealth, access and privilege. In this process, the slave mode of production conditioned the social existence of master (a white ‘other’) and slave (a black ‘other’) alike. Homophobia in the black community is in no small part a product of the conditions of slavery, apartheid and systemic racism. Black male sexuality and black male masculinity is a product of this historical trifecta (slavery, apartheid and systemic racism) of dehumanization and powerlessness.

Riff - Duration: ( 3.50 Mins ) Perform a monologue or spoken improvisation about black male sexuality and black male masculinity  - using notes below. 

• Slavery:
  
  Forced, controlled and coerced, the reproductive capacity of black females produced off-spring reared in a retarded form of ‘family’ called ‘slave’. This adjective family was seeded by black males and headed by white slave masters. A white washed spiritual figure head - “Jesus” - appointed to head the ‘souls of black folk’ was second in command to white masters. In both head and bed the black male’s seed was sowed in fertility not his own and reaped in a harvesting of his masculinity for another man’s benefit. Deprived of a sense of self, his other half and the fate of his off-spring, the black male existed socially as some - ‘thing’- minus the qualities and attributes regarded as characteristic of men in any epoch. So began the dearth of black male sexuality and black male masculinity. In the homophobic gaze of black males, the gay black male is a constant reminder of a historical scarcity and lack of qualities and attributes that for centuries proved the manhood of white males who dominated and subordinated his masculinity and sexuality. In this way, homophobia in the black community is the price of servitude and degradation.
  
  
• Apartheid: 

Freed but not free, the freedom of the black male became the threat his sexuality posed to the virtue of white women and the purity of a race. His masculinity, a challenge to a status quo of wealth, access and privilege preserved his “non-being”. He remained powerless to be safe or to keep safe that and who he loved. His wife was groped in front of him by white hands of the law. The arms of  justice hugged his black body behind bars forged to define his life and defy his will. Unbound, his masculinity was broken. A virulent vagabond, he wandered casted out in a world content to be the potential denied him and his. Being what he had always been in the eyes of white men, he saw black women shimmering in his emasculated ‘male gaze’ , often a desired ‘object’ to be dominated, sometimes a ‘thing’ to be subordinated. Prone to mimicking the misogyny of the white ‘male gaze’ he dominated black women in the ways he had been subjugated by white men. Marinating in unrequited appreciations of a “man’s” social roles and functions, the idea of extending civil rights and liberties to gay men mocked his degraded manhood.
 

• Systemic Racism: 

Festering beneath the scab of tolerance, an unacceptable sexuality and masculinity pigeonholes the black male body between despair and disparities. Chance and necessity wears the albatross of a past unfolding into his present. Drowning in waters of opportunity his emaciated manhood withers thirsting for unfettered dreams.  The self-seen in other black men grounding in similar situations confronts, comforts and undermines his confidence. A retarded notion of ‘respect’ becomes a battleground for a tug of war between life and death that begins and ends on streets of gold. Himself the rule, every exception is a reminder of the hope for a future that unfolds beyond the policing and the fetishized profiteering of his physiology.  Sexuality puts his manhood on trial. He is sentenced in absentia to the tribulations of a phallic appendage that sizes up the dog in the fight, not the fight in the dog.  Seeing no worth afforded the masculinity he desires or the manhood his sexuality respects, he growls at the struggle of gay black males for a social existence that is not his reality.

PLAY➤

"I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage, and some black brothers and I have grounded together." - Walter Rodney

Each morning began with a walk to the front door where two or three white plastic bags hung off the knob. The corner boyz had pitched in to buy breakfast items. This tradition started after I noticed one of them living out of his car across the street from the corner he worked. I made him a plate of grits, eggs and bacon which I dropped off on my way to work. On my way back home he returned my dishes. 

A couple mornings later I had enough breakfast food to make plates for the guys living in the house they used as a trap house. One of the local crackheads had climbed the power pole to run a bootleg supply of electricity to the house. All of the windows were blocked or blacked out. At night employees of the electric company drove around looking for lights in abandoned houses.There was no running water. Without discussion or notification the morning ritual of white plastic bags hanging on my door knob began. I integrated the breakfast items with whatever I was having that morning. 

After reaching the point of preparing five plates each morning, it made sense to buy paper plates and plastic utensils in bulk. On weekends, I took the time and opportunity to eat with them. It was during these early morning conversations that I learned of a recurring angst that vexed them. They had to check in with their parole officers with proof of employment. Rarely did their parole officer travel to their location. They had to pay for public transportation half way across town. Sometimes it was easier to violate parole. A couple of weeks in jail meant three square meals and showers. Vacation, they called it. 

In an effort to offset the cost of rent, I assisted the property manager with several projects including collecting rent from other tenants. In addition to managing properties he had a number of side hustles. He was contracted to secure vacant homes, make sure the water was turned off, that new locks and lock boxes were installed, the lawn mowed, clean out of vacated homes etc. For several of the jobs, the property manager hired day laborers. I asked him for permission to staff the jobs that required day laborers. He agreed provided I made sure they showed and completed assigned tasks. 

The next time they had to meet their parole officers, I had drafted a letter of employment that included a copy of receipts of the payment they received for work. During the week, I worked for iLearn Studios. On the weekends, I was on site working alongside the corner boyz whose other source of income was selling ‘crack cocaine’ and "mid" (low quality weed). 

One evening the boyz approached an unfamiliar vehicle park in the neighborhood. The men inside assured them they were there because of me not them. Upon receiving this information and learning that the boyz had been offered money to report on my comings and goings, I had to make a decision. I told them to take the money and report on my movements and activities as directed. This shit had been happening since the homophobic entrapment schemes at YorkU and filming me at SteamWorks Toronto. One way or another an effort would be made to get my neighbors and persons with whom I had any contact with to either surveil or harass me. The effort extended to moving people next to or near me to sustain or facilitate forms of stalking and harassment. From Canada to the U.S., in city after city, year after year the only new feature of this pattern of behavior was the artifice (enrolled student, off-duty police, Christian faith, crack dealer etc.) assailants employed to harass, trick, stalk or deceive. The common denominator was always the foreign nationals aiding (financial) and abetting (corruption) ‘the matter’. 

In more ways than not these adult black males 18+, I refer to as corner boyz, were as vulnerable as the adult male students in my class at YorkU. Even more so, if you consider that they were basically homeless living hand to mouth from day to day. If someone wanted to pay them to gather information that did not pose a physical threat to my person, that was ok with me. Put another way, I cooked breakfast for them free of charge but the food they contributed cost money, money they did not always have in their pocket on any given day. Besides that, the situation presented an opportunity to hide a few more "Easter Eggs".

PLAY➤

I am not concluding this episode with this narrative to talk about ‘the matter’. This narrative is a continuation of my consideration of  black male masculinity and sexuality. I have emphasized homophobia in the black community. To not point out an exception to this negative experience of black community would be dishonest and wrong. During my time in Atlanta, I made the acquaintance of persons higher up the food chain at which the corner boyz were at the bottom. At first, there was a deep suspicion and mistrust of this gay black articulate intellectual who had involved himself in the day-to-day of their front line workers - so to speak. Oddly enough, being the object of surveillance and harassment arising out of ‘the matter’ gave me street credit. With time and intense scrutiny, they began to appreciate how the contract-work and the letters to parole officers and for court dates kept their guys out of jail. They took note of every time I delivered groceries or cooked food to the boyz. 

In time, having earned enough trust, I could stroll up to one of the trap houses serving as a main hub, sit down and shoot the shit with them. At this level, the guys I hung out with had houses, cars and all the bling. The reason the corner boyz showed up at 6 AM to work on Saturday morning had little to do with me. There were bigger thumbs on the scale. And, they had no patience for 'the matter'. Outside my bedroom window, I overheard a conversation between a Hispanic female and a mid-level dealer. She was upset because he had nothing to report on me that advanced 'the matter'. I laughed as he said to her in an exasperated tone, "but he hasn't done anything". 

The subject of my sexuality was addressed directly and often either through humor or serious conversations. Much to my surprise it was the guys whose masculinity and sexuality had been tested in and under the most extreme conditions of incarceration who were the least homophobic. I never felt threatened or aggressed. It would be a misrepresentation to say that they were accepting of homosexuality. It would be more accurate to say that homosexuality was not disqualifying. Rather, homosexuality, in general, was qualified by the person who was gay. In other words, my sexuality did not filter or determine my social interactions as it does among black people who signify the professional, academic, athletic, religious, common laborer etc. My homosexuality did not prevent them from seeing me. They did not demonstrate the paranoid masculinity that makes the hetersexuality of many black males a transparent image of ‘manhood’. Being comfortable in their own skin they had no reason to crawl mine. Time spent with them was not an experience of ‘the homophobic gaze’. 

SEASON 03/ EPISODE 05: ‘Acorn and Oak’

Spoken Word Intro S03E05: Duration: ( 0.00 Mins )

 

‘Acorn and Oak’ by Tom L. States

A seed thrown down.
Grounding with my brothers and sisters through
dirt
shit
tears
piss
sweat

“i” turn in it all around
Autumns
Winters
Summers
Falls
“i”  spring
“i” break
“i” blossom
“i” crawl

Under the Sun,Through the Wind,Soaked by Rain
“i” sprawl growing
Up
Down
Through
Around

In my season, “i” break ground

PLAY➤

A tactic I adopted after receiving confirmation that my electronic communications were compromised was to purchase several SIM cards. I put 20$ on each card with a 2$ a day basic plan. Several friends and casual associates did not comply with requests not to tell me that had been approached by persons affiliated with ‘the matter’. With one known exception, they were a trusted cadre. I distributed the SIM cards among them. At random times or encounters we exchanged SIM cards. If a call or a message came in for someone other than me on the SIM card I used at any given time, I forwarded the text or voice message to the person for whom it was intended. 

The SIM card roulette scattered lines of electronic communication. This allowed me to securely obtain and exchange information and stay one step ahead of the effort. The ‘active shooter’ drills I did with Sean were based on prior iterations of the scheme directed by his ‘girl’ friend at persons other than me. The ‘active shooter’ drills gave me enough information to perform a basic threat assessment. Efforts on behalf of ‘the matter’ to neutralize the SIM roulette were also informative. It forced ‘the matter’ out. 

Prior to the SIM card roulette, a series of open questions left me wondering how and by what means my communications were compromised. For friends who were cold called, how were their names and telephone numbers obtained? What was the nature of the effort that went into identifying ex-partners, emailing them and obtaining from them private contact information of other persons known to me? In other words, what was the scope and purpose of the social engineering attack beyond YorkU’s structured learning community? 

It is important to note here that the SIM card roulette came after students registered for my sessions were enlisted to participate in homophobic entramptment schemes. The SIM card roulette occurred after I was secretly filmed at SteamWorks Toronto. My situational awareness at the time I adopted the SIM card roulette was also shaped by knowledge that friends, family and former partners had been cold called and emailed by persons unknown to me or them. ‘The matter’ coalesced as a scheme that communicated with intimate and social relations while directing anonymous attacks, through third parties, at my person. 

To counter my SIM card roulette, everyone that I talked to or spent time with in gay bars and clubs were, during a period of time, apporached and asked if they knew me before being asked for their contact information.  This information gathering scheme was brought to my attention in real time. I witnessed this effort as it was taking place. The first thought that came to mind was Sean’s question in response to me telling him how I would react to various scenarios. 

“But who is going to believe you?” 

If you recall from the previous episode, consideration of Sean’s question informed my decision to target the persons through whom aggression was channeled. In a series of letters to stakeholders whose interests were infringed or compromised by ‘the matter’ I identified persons subject to disciplinary procedures based on their participation in the scheme.  These letters, documenting collateral consequences, are ‘receipts’ of ‘the matter’. Over the last decade, I have assembled these letters (epistles) as part of a literary project titled ‘An Epistolary of True Lies’.  The fully scripted version of this DEMO podcast will be based on this collection of letters to stakeholders.

Turning a gay or bar club into an opportunity to crowd source homopobic hostility was to be expected under the circumstances at the time. It was less intrusive than secretly filming me in a gay sauna. It was a more offensive assault on LGBTQ community and the male students enlisted to make sexual advances during class. Not so subtle invasions of privacy and LGBTQ community were intentional mirco agressions. This childish hubris informed several other defensive measures that were more elaborate than my SIM card roulette. 

Inverting 'the homophobic gaze' is a practical not a theoretical matter. It requires using the assigned pathologies that blind 'the homophobic observer' as a means to make 'the observer' and the pathology they project onto the social existence of ‘the observed’evident. Here individuated members of any given observed community (assigned category) have the advantage of being both visible and invisible. That is, 'the observed' is 'looked at' but not seen by 'the observer' who can only see what he or she is 'looking for', the pathology they impute. The purblindness of 'the observer' gives 'the observed' both a tactical and a strategic advantage.

Patterns of behavior contained elements of potential countermeasures. For example, after the attempt to stage a hostile interaction with ‘Casandra’ over the homophobic email, I set up a new class email. Every student in the class was given the email address and the password.  Every student could see the conversation thread of any email that I responded to or received. If a student needed to communicate confidential or private concerns they could hand me a written note or schedule an appointment during my office hours - in an open public space e.g. lobby of Scott Library 

Remember the first example of an easter egg from Episode 03. The contents of that easter egg were adapted from the incident at SteamWorks Toronto. My assailant's interest in the interaction I had with German guests translated to the conversation with my former partner, in Berlin, about Sean’s “alleged” ‘Crystal Meth’ use. This easter egg was also structured around the impetus of cold calls made to family, friends and associates. These cold calls indicated technical aspects of how my communications were compromised . 

From time to time staged encounters / interactions were a means of indirect messaging, a way of making certain forms of harassment and stalking obvious. This pattern of behavior falls under the gaslighting category of “staging bizarre” events. For example, in a cafe on YorkU’s campus a Hispanic male with a directional microphone positioned himself within my line of sight.  When I refer to child-like hubris, I mean it literally. I mean a cadre of immature rich kids with toys ( gadgets) acting out and on the impulses of a spoiled rich ‘girl’. The intended message was redundant. I was never under the impression that my conversations were not compromised or not being weaponized against me. I knew better than to precipitate Sean’s question repeated during our active shooter drill - “Who would believe you?’   Other than posing himself for a screen shot that will assist identifying him at some point, what this individual did not know was that there were two conversations going on at that table. One verbally and one conducted by typing text messages that were unsent and passed around and answered on cell phones at the table.   

It defies common sense that such a broad crowd-sourcing scheme would remain confidential among my students, chatty members of the LGBTQ community, my friends who were cold called etc. This is what I mean when I say that staging bizarre events/encounters as a means of indirect messaging - other than to harass - was redundant.

Indirect messaging has not just been a feature of ‘the matter’. Indirect messaging is among the patterns of behavior that characterize ‘the matter’. 

For example, a friend with whom I spoke about ‘the matter’ reminded me of an email that I sent to him 10+ years (2003) prior to his bringing it up in conversation about ‘the matter’. When I told him that I did not recall sending him the email (Re:H. Mark Roelofs) to which he referred, he sent me a text message (2019) with a cropped picture of the email. I could see that the email was a snapshot of an email that I had written as a graduate student at New York University. The bunch holes visible in the photo indicated that it was in a binder. It did not appear to be the kind of email I would write to him. I was supposed to believe that I had sent the email to him and that he kept it for approximately 17 years but was unable to send me an electronic copy or a pic of the entire email with headings. The friend who sent me the pilfered email is currently an attorney in Florida. His name is Joseph Discepola. He is one of  many friends who was contacted by persons unknown to me and puppeted to message me indirectly. The indirect message arising out of this incident was the same message communicated to me by the landlord whose undocumented workers I reported to I.C.E. 

Pattern of Behavior:

• Reach out to friends and associates and enlist them in the scheme - (a) infiltrate: establishing a relationship or initiating an interaction (b) urgently ask for their help/assistance: “Person X is suffering or being investigated etc., will you do xyz…” (c) piggybacking: appearing to be a representative or affiliated with a legitimate entity or person e.g., school(YorkU), institution (Police), community(Faith)
• Manipulate trusted relationships [ viz., defraud the trust and credibility of friends and associates] to message or harass using information or communications obtained by hacking emails or private conversation taking place in-person or over the telephone.
• Indirect messaging that relies on emails, social media post or text messages as a means of subterfuge that face-to-face or voice conversations would undermined

Other than subterfuge and violation of my privacy by hacking and weaponizing my gmail account, the most disturbing thing to me is the personal information of friends who sent me emails over the years and how that information was used. The information was used in some cases to threaten and intimidate friends and associates that resisted the transgressive nature of ‘the matter’. For example, among the emails hacked are those with conversation threads discussing the difficult time that my LGBTQ friends and associates were having with their HIV+ status.

 

Cocky assailants were looking and listening for opportunities to weaponize homophobic and racist tropes. My physical and legal person were reduced to a socially engineered imago (ideation) that was the subject of allegations and insinuations shared with co-workers, family, friends, strangers, former partners, professors, casual acquaintances etc. Negating (neutralizing) communications and interactions that allowed me to defend and define myself against the propaganda campaign made it difficult to find my way out of a maze of deception festooned with premeditated adversities.

“If you are looking for a way out, don't forget, that finding a way in might end up being the way out.” - unknown 

When unable to find a way out, I found a way further in. An example of a way further in was presented in Episode 04. Unable to stop efforts to enlist my Atlanta neighbors in the scheme, I encouraged the corner boyz to take the money and report back as directed. 

My assailants were primed by bigotry to believe the worst and willing to make up shit when the worst did not trigger bigotry in a target audience or person.  The way further in was to nurture the ideation - the imago - of me to the point of absurdity. The point of absurdity is when characterizations had to pan out or undermine ‘the matter’. Think of it as a grenade disguised as an “easter egg”. There were short-term disadvantages to me but once the pin was pulled the mischaracterizations and lies were not blowing up in my hand or face. 

[Teaser - In a fully scripted version of this podcast there will be an episode similar to Episode 03 “Easter Eggs” in this DEMO transcript. The episode will be titled: “Grenades” End Teaser]

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.” -- Joseph Campbell

As ‘the matter’ evolved, I learned that in addition to the cold calls, made to slander and to isolate, there were in-person visits to family and friends to secure, if not their cooperation with ‘the matter’, their acquiescence.  It became necessary to escalate my countermeasures to a full frontal assault on the structure of the scheme. This problematic presented itself as a ‘how to’. How could I mount a frontal assault on a propaganda campaign that was well financed, organized and for its intents and purposes - effective? My presentation of ‘the matter’ with more hindsight makes my critical thinking and problem solving sound like a linear narrative. At the time neither were. 

There was incoming from all sides, honeypot entrapment schemes, homophobic emails, driveby stalking on and off campus, secret filming at SteamWorks, harassment inside of gay clubs, bars etc, cold calls to apartment managers, warnings and concern communications from friends, so on and so forth. When under attack, I kicked into contemporaneous accounts mode and began formulating first drafts of letters, flyers, emails etc., to stakeholders documenting collateral consequences. Constant, the attacks account for a large trove of written material. 

Let me recount for you machinations as they were told to me at a time I only had bits and pieces of the origin story that launched ‘the matter’.

‘Sean’s ‘girl’ friend invited, to her home in Mexico, a ‘friend’ who I met at Williams College. At some point, when the cra-cra became obvious and my ‘friend’ was no longer swayed by transgressive fiction being served, he detached himself from the scheme. Meanwhile, a close male friend of Sean’s, who had also been invited to Mexico was sent on an all expense paid tour to profer slander to my friends and family in-person. Sean’s ‘girl’ friend, jealous of Sean’s feeling for this male friend, hatched a plan to abandon ‘the messenger’ in an airport after a phone call informing him that he no longer wanted in Mexico.’ 

‘The messenger’ contacted me in Toronto after being used and rejected. Patterns of similar behavior over the last decade have confirmed the account I am sharing with you. By patterns of behavior, I do not mean the cold calls made to friends and family. I mean other persons familiar to me  (e.g. fellow graduates of The McCallie School) being invited to Mexico and enlisted in ‘the scheme’. 

The night I checked out SteamWorks, after being secretly filmed, harassed and implicitly threatened outside my door, I fell into a deep sleep. It was a sleep, so deep that when I woke up it took a moment to remember that I was in my apartment, the one I would soon be asked to vacate. 

It was around three o’clock in the morning, my witching hour. As I slumbered my brain decompressed and reset. I woke up with the answer to my ‘how to’ question. How do I mount a frontal assault on a well financed and organized propaganda campaign? 

Musical jingle/sound effects Duration (0.57)

START - NARRATIVE OF HOMOPHOBIC MISOGYNY….TEXT

In Canada and the United States of America the power of Mexican kleptocrats is disembodied. Their wealth, access and influence (power) does not put at their disposal the levers of state power. Here they cannot disappear 43 students, obstruct the investigation and avoid accountability by throwing a few scapegoats under the bus. Outside of a ‘body politic’ susceptible to the kind of corruption and control that make the nation-state of  Mexico a kleptocracy, Mexican kleptocrats are subject to the rule of law. 

In North America, Mexican kleptocrats' pursuit of personal gain at the expense of the governed requires (i) a person who retards the activity of citizenship and who undermine the rights and privileges of citizenship, (ii) an entity that retards its functions and negates civil and human rights and or (iii) public corruption of persons entrusted with the states’ monopoly of violence.

EDIT Text . . Here I want to focus on ‘‘amalgams of personal bias and state functions’ from the vantage point of law enforcement and the rule-of-law. Let's return to the example of Trayvon and Zimmerman. What happens when the state’s monopoly of violence is defrauded, appropriated or entrusted to persons who apply it as a means of imposing their beliefs and prejudices? There is a nuance to ‘amalgams of personal bias and state functions’ that decrypts ‘the matter’ in relation to ‘the homophobic gaze’. 

When I say ‘the matter’ is ‘amalgams of personal bias and state functions’ I am talking about how ‘the homophobic gaze’- as personal bias- functions and dysfunctions to determine permission structures or grey areas.  Persons acting on behalf of ‘the matter’ have felt entitled, comfortable and justified to disregard with a depraved indifference not just my civil and human rights, but the social existence of every aspect of LGBTQ community. ‘The matter’ has proceeded in a space above the law where the rule-of-law is negated by any means necessary to obstruct accountability. ‘The matter’ has been a process of pointing homophobia and racism at the target of a spoiled rich girl's social-sexual anxieties.

In other words, Mexican kleptocrats must find someone or entity to embody their transgressive thoughts and impulses. Actualizing an institutional version of the homophobia rooted in exaggerated machismo required the physical presence (the bodies) of students registered for my sessions. Manipulating YorkU’s organizational behavior functioned to misrepresent acts and actions as the official response and disposition of York University.  Such was the synergy between gaslighting and social engineering.

In Federalist Papers No. 10, 1787, James Madison speaks to latent causes of faction brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. He warned of persons who divide [human kind] into parties, inflame them with mutual animosity, and render them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. 

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. – James Madison

‘The matter’ is not something new under the sun. In the annals of history, ‘total war’ waged by an ambitious faction to curate pre-eminence and power is cliché. What distinguishes ‘the matter’ is time, manner and place. 

Time: ‘The matter’ is a scheme that resuscitates the dysfunctions that made state, civil society and community culpable for violations of civil and human rights in Mississippi a decade before I was born. Writing about the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Joseph Lelyveld describes the cognitive dissonance of the white community in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The ‘body politic’ (state, civil society, community) in Philadelphia had to come to terms with the fact that the ‘total war’ waged against the social existence of the civil rights workers was aided and abetted by local law enforcement officials, the mayor, the clergy, the local newspaper, the chamber of commerce and a silent majority of “good” citizens. (By Joseph Lelyveld - A Stranger In Philadelphia, Mississippi ) Other than my race and sexuality there is nothing about my social existence that contextualizes the depth and scope of machinations to apply control, force and coercion - anonymously - through third parties and proxies affiliated with the structure and functions of  state, civil society and community. In other words, racism and homophobia function as targeting mechanisms.

Manner: ‘The matter’ is a distillation of bigotry into anonymous and impersonal  acts, actions and activities that hijack and retard specific social interactions. The scheme instigates conflicts-of-difference by staging encounters (gaslighting) and interactions (social engineering). Bigotry, operationalized, allows bad actors to insinuate themselves in an ensemble of social relations in order to create a hostile environment and to direct specific attacks on civil rights and liberties.  This mob violence (control, force and coercion)  [a] purposively agitates viz., gaslights various forms of bigotry (racism, homophobia, religious bigotry etc.,), [b] manipulates (graft, corruption etc.,) viz., social engineers -functions of state, civil society and community and [c] sustains viz., finances patterns of assaults and attacks on the physical and legal person targeted by a scheme of premeditated adversity. In other words, ‘the matter’ re-engineers the social relations of closed societies as a means of privileging private interests over civil and human rights. 

Place: During Reconstruction and in the Jim Crow South the set and pattern of behaviors that characterize transgressive schemes (e.g., ‘the matter’) were dysfunctions of political and social structures. Put another way, the transgressions that contextualized violations of civil and human rights were not an artificial ecosystem during Reconstruction and in the Jim Crow South but rather political, social and economic systems. In Mexico, the wealth, access and influence (power) of kleptocrats can be attributed to dysfunctions of that country’s political, social and economic systems. Imposing and imprinting the dysfunctions of social relations in Mexico, on the body politic (state, civil society and community) in Canada and the United States requires an exercise of power (wealth, access and influence) to apply violence (force, control and coercion). 

Riff - Duration: ( 4.50 Mins ) Perform a monologue or spoken improvisation on a comparative example of zero sum depraved indifference - 43 disappeared Mexican students and local authorities - using notes below. 

Thieves of State: Corrupt ‘Body Politic’ 

(i) school known for its social activism (e.g., taking over highway toll booths to solicit donations and commandeering buses to carry students to events)

(ii) local police took them off buses that day in September 2014

(iii) local police turned students over to a local gang

(iv) Mexican authorities misdirected a team of international experts formed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to the wrong mass grave site 

Personal gain at expense of the governed

(i) long standing tolerance by the federal authorities of collusion between local politicians, police forces and organised crime

(ii) wife of mayor - Maria de los Angeles Piñeda  - tied to members of the Guerreros Unidos gang who worked closely with her husband to set up checkpoints at the entrance to Iguala to keep out rival gangs

(iii) She had been interrupted by a similar ruckus at a public event in June 2013, and so she reportedly decided to take pre-emptive action this time

(iv) “Teach them a lesson,” [Maria de los Angeles Piñeda] ordered, according to one account

PLAY➤

I owe the New York City Police Department (NYPD) a debt of gratitude. After leaving the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), I pursued my Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) complaint, for a short time, from New York City. Members of the NYPD intervened on more than one occasion to shield me from stalking and harassment that began in Toronto. Official representatives of NYPD and Toronto Police Services (TPS) distinguished themselves from the effort I now refer to as ‘the matter’. 

In contrast to the Toronto Police Services (TPS) distinguishing itself from ‘the matter’, the person caught - in real time- secretly filming me in a gay spa did not identify himself as an agent of ‘the matter’. Rather than acknowledge his activity as conduct in a private capacity on behalf of Mexican kleptocrats, he referred the manager of Steamworks Toronto to his ‘leader’. ‘Leader’ is the term used by Toronto Police Services (TPS) for members in its command structure. This was the first time an off-duty member of the law enforcement camouflaged - as ‘police activity’ - extralegal activities that would have resulted in the arrest of an average citizen.  This was the first time extralegal activity was camouflaged as official ‘police action’ when the perpetrator found him or herself  in a tough spot or sought to avoid accountability for unlawful acts. 

During the introduction summarizing this DEMO, I pointed out that the DEMO would focus on the ‘how’ of producing a podcast in a way that may or may not neglect the ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the themes discussed. The narrative that I have shared with you about the incident at SteamWorks Toronto does not answer key questions that I plan to cover in a fully scripted version of this podcast. For example, ‘what’ kind of effort went into monitoring my movements prior to secretly filming of me, ‘how’ did they know ‘when’ I was there, ‘why’ did the secret filming take place in a gay spa, ‘when’ did the persons filming become aware of the room number randomly assigned me by front desk check-in staff, ‘where’ did the money come to pay for the perpetrator’s room, ‘where’ is  the video today? SteamWorks Totonto was open 24/7. My visits were not part of a routine. Although random, my room assignment was conditioned by a request I made not to be assigned specific rooms and the cost differential of each space. 

In Season 3, Episode 03, I discuss the second time extralegal activity was camouflaged as official ‘police action’.   This time the incident was a result of  disinformation I deployed. Borrowing a computer software term that refers to secret responses that occur as a result of an undocumented set of commands, I describe describe the disinfromaton as ‘Easter Eggs’. 

More important and to the point, the ‘state power’ was rented out to foreign nationals for their personal gain. The imprimatur of ‘state power’ (Canada) was put in the service of interests incompatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Mexican nationals were ‘thieves of state’ operating in Canada with impunity. 

Music Segue: Tech N9ne track without lyrics - Fragile/Been Dealt A Hand

[WRITE: narrative of night at internet cafe and letter submitted on FBI website]We all owe a debt of gratitude to the United States Postal Inspection Service.  In violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1701 agents of ‘the matter’ made two attempts to retrieve mail that I posted to the HRTO, Julian Bond, and Canadian Union of Public Employees (C.U.P.E.). The first attempt at social engineering to ‘bigfoot’ postal workers failed. Reminiscent of social engineering directed at YorkU officials, the second attempt to retrieve mail I posted was directed at night shift postal employees under less supervision. It succeeded. The United States Postal Inspection Service took decisive and corrective action. After I have mastered the learning curve associated with producing this DEMO podcast, I look forward to scripting and producing the season and episodes that detail and address this dimension of ‘the matter’.

The United States is not perfect. Neither are our citizens. Allowing or facilitating our imperfections to function as a window of opportunity for foreign nationals (kleptocrats, plutocrats etc.,) to, for whatever reason, advance their interest over those expressly afforded us by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights [Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] is not tolerable. Yes, we have had privileged persons use their wealth, access and influence to usurp the rule of law.  Such persons have, as in the case Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein, made a mockery of the rule-of-law, free press etc., and dedicated endless resources to obstructing attempts to hold them accountable. (Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies) 

During civil rights movements, state and federal government agencies employed and deployed human and financial resources to undermine progressives and progressive movements. These efforts included recruiting people of color to work against the civil and human rights of persons of color.  (The Spies of Mississippi) Daily we are learning of abuses of power by the previous administration (‘Pure insanity’: How Trump and his allies pressured the Justice Department

to help overturn the election) 

Call to action

#Civil RICO

A civil RICO action is more likely to be successful if it carries with it the attributes of a criminal case, such as bribes, kickbacks, threats, or commission of violence.

• Civil - Pursue remedies  adhering patterns of behavior proscribed by civil law.
• Criminal - Refer patterns of behavior proscribed by criminal law to authorities. 
• Administrative - File complaints pertaining activities proscribed by disciplinary policies and procedures with state authorities that license and sanction practitioners. 

Send listeners to a landing page for free resources.

Let listeners know where they can donate to your podcast.

Musical jingle/sound effects

 

Text. . .

Text . . 

In the hustle and bustle of the pop up car wash I saw a unicorn. It appeared among a sea of black faces, soap subs and cars bejeweled with beads of water.  He was a white man wearing a carnival barker’s outfit. His suit gleamed every color of the rainbow. In his briefcase were a selection of knock-off colognes and perfumes.

Eric Garner lost his life for doing the same thing this white man was up to in the hood. Both  were selling an unregulated, unlicensed and untaxed product in a public area. His game was matching the aura of potential customers with a scent.  Fearless and confident, he approached anyone that made eye contact with him.   Noticing me noticing him, he came over and greeted me with a friendly smile. I listened to his pitch.

In terms of polish it was pitch perfect. I ,however, was more interested in the warm reception he received from the lower income black customers.  After declining his offer, I asked why his customers were willing to pay $10 and $15 dollars for something they know is fake. His answer was so insightful I almost brought a bottle out of respect for the quality of his sales rap.

“People pay the price of the smell.”