Elizabeth Nickson's Hate Speech
ethics is consistency and no proper nouns
In this episode, I look at Elizabeth Nickson’s post “Campus Protesters Are Straight Up Nazis,” subtitled, ‘From the River to the Sea is genocidal.’ She ain’t talking Israel, my friends. This is her opening meme:
Elizabeth Nickson writes the Substack ‘Welcome to Absurdistan’ with over 16,000 subscribers. She’s the author of The Monkey Puzzle Tree, which I’ve read, and Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying Our Natural Heritage.
Her literary pedigree includes TIME magazine, European bureau chief of Life, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, British Vogue, Harper’s, the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer. Her literal pedigree goes back to the Puritan founders of the US and Canada, and she is a bonafide Daughter of the American Revolution. Her blended family today includes Venezuelan, Jamaican and Jew, as she wants us to know.
Gavin Mounsey, with whom my readers might be familiar, has criticized her justifications for clear-cut logging of the last remaining ancient forests in British Columbia, Canada. I’ll be presenting some of his research but here is the full text:
In my episode I’ll be looking at Elizabeth’s logic and ethical consistency—a phrase that’s redundant because ethics IS consistency. I define hate speech as superiority—insulting other people rather than looking for the cause in stories and systems that pit people against one another. My focus is on the systems and stories.
Let’s start with the forest and move to the trees. And from Amy Rosebush, here’s a little owl to help us (along with the rest of the beautiful AI art).
crooked tree
By happenstance, I was listening to the Front Porch playlist on Spotify while making a chocolate cake. And a song came on called Crooked Tree by Molly Tuttle:
Crooked tree won't fit into the mill machine They're left to grow, wild and free I'd rather be a crooked tree.
logging isn’t the problem
Gavin grew up in British Columbia, to which Elizabeth has returned. Her ancestors came to Vancouver when it was 4000 people and ‘developed’ it. His grandfather was a forester in Vancouver and helped create/protect Lost Lake Park in Whistler, the Cheakamus Canyon Old Growth Trail, and parks/trails all through the Sea to Sky corridor. He grew up with loggers and knows that it can be done in a way to create jobs, nurture human communities and protect biodiversity and ancient forests.
Gavin’s most recent fan is James Corbett, so he’s clearly not falling for the Climate Change psyop that Elizabeth rightly debunks in:
Elizabeth starts her article with a solicitation from the RFK campaign, to which she responds that she’ll donate as soon as he fixes the problem he caused in the province where she lives. She explains the problem:
1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world
2. It paid for education and universal ‘free’ health care.
3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.
4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.
5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)
6. That triggered the protest.
pulp fiction
In a comment to Elizabeth, Gavin linked evidence that cutting old growth trees increased the fire hazard. He then gave some background to that ‘industrial forest’ in point #1, which seems like a factory in the wild. He writes:
Since 2000, Canada has lost more than 19.6 million hectares of primary forest, the third highest rate of intact forest loss in the world after Brazil and Russia. B.C. saw by far the biggest decline in tree cover of any province, losing more than 8.5 million hectares.
Much of that loss has been due to the pulp and paper industry. Roughly 40 per cent of the trees cut in the province every year end up in a pulp mill, according to data collected by Canopy, a Vancouver-based organization that works with over 900 major brands to create so called "sustainable" forestry supply chains.
The pace of loss comes as decisions over Canada’s forests are increasingly being concentrated into the hands of one private company—Paper Excellence. Recently, the company acquired Resolute Forest Products, making it the largest forestry company in North America. Paper Excellence now controls 22 million hectares of Canadian forests and has ownership over 37 pulp and paper mills across Canada, the U.S., France and Brazil.
Paper Excellence has said between 10 and 14 per cent of the wood feeding its mills comes from old-growth trees.
The people behind and/or associated with Paper Excellence have a pattern of using thickets of corporations, including tax havens, effectively shielding transactions and assets from public and government scrutiny.
Freedom of information requests revealed the origins of some of the company’s past financing, some of which was facilitated by the China Development Bank, which is owned by the Chinese government.
Leaked records and insider accounts also show that Paper Excellence, appears to have been closely — and secretly — co-ordinating business and strategy decisions with Asia Pulp & Paper, one of the world's biggest pulp-and-paper players, which has a track record of environmental destruction.
Poor lessees, paying those taxes for decades, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. What else could they do but clear cut the the last remaining ancient rainforest stands IN THE WORLD? And pulp them into digits in a bank account?
pirates of the trees
Gavin addresses Point #2 on ‘industrial forests’ paying for education and free universal healthcare:
what kind of education system? One that suffocates our children with medical looking facemasks, conditions them to be afraid, offers them gender reassignment and coerces them to receive experimental mRNA injections so that pfizer can profit? … And do not even get me started on the "health" care system. (for more info on the wonders of our modern allopathic medical system:
Gavin also refers to the indigenous population, who managed their own education and healthcare until the benevolent colonists came along. My daughters are still haunted by a documentary I had them watch about those nightmare, trauma-inducing schools.
In his recent article, Why I Do Not Celebrate Canada Day, Gavin writes:
Think the residential schools are some kind of isolated incident?
I have friends with heritage rooted in several different First Nation cultures. Some are old enough where they remember when the government agents and RCMP came for them and their siblings to kidnap them and drag them off to to the residential "schools". https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Survivors_Speak_English_Web.pdf
Some eluded their would be captors and had to live a life on the run as young adults, some were not so lucky and the stories they tell me about the atrocities that were perpetrated upon innocent children there (in Government sponsored facilities run by priests and nuns) are so disturbing that hearing them would bring tears to your eyes and make you sick to your stomach. Torture and Mass Murder of innocent children took place in those facilities all over Canada. These facilities were engaging in the forced sterilization of indigenous girls up until the year 2000 in some provinces.
As a reader of Gavin’s, Pirate Studebaker, responded to me:
Elizabeth is a mid-level elitist. She actually believes her ancestors did the indigenous peoples a "favor" by stealing their land and destroying their lives and culture.
Now that the descendants of the people her ancestors destroyed have many social problems, like poverty, she blames them and even says they are ingrates.
I am a citizen of a Native Nation and I know what I'm talking about.
the left shut it down
It’s not the fault of those poor capitalists. Elizabeth doesn’t blame them for their perfectly reasonable asset grab. It’s the damned greens who interfered, forcing the revenooers to grab-n-go. Elizabeth writes:
I’ve spent enough time on the cultural left, the hard left and the communist left, up and down the status scale, to know this is what they think of humanity. They hate us, and a lot. This is a bog-common human trait, which Christianity, when it was the flower of the culture, made sure to battle every Sunday in church. Even if it hurts, you are supposed to love your neighbor. It is still true in the real, not-left world.
Christianity, the flower of the culture! Love preached from the pulpits every Sunday! Oh my. I had to look up ‘bog-common’ and found it associated with marshes of ill-repute and latrines, as in the denigrating term ‘bog-Irish.’
So the common folk of humanity is a swamp of hatred, from which the flower of the loving Christian right has bloomed. Elizabeth ends with this love bomb:
They will destroy western civilization in order to prosecute this lie. And they will do it without guilt, while revelling in hate and luxury.
If not stopped, Greens will become the most brutal oppressors and genocidal maniacs in human history.
If that’s what she calls love, I wonder what she calls hate. Oh yeah, people who give up their comfort and freedom to prevent 1000 yr old trees from being felled for pulp.
stupidity is abuse
Elizabeth’s response to Gavin’s article demonstrates her club membership:
Like thousands in BC, Gavin, I own 20,000 trees, and more than two dozen old growth. B.C. Is 6% developed. And the forest were managed well.
Gavin replies:
Saying "B.C. Is 6% developed." is an intentionally vague statement that says nothing about how much of the original intact (unlogged) forest still remains.
Since there is only 2% of the original old growth (primary/ancient) temperate rainforest left in BC (which is the only section left in the world that has not been clearcut) you can understand that we have been chopping down very old trees and replanting monocultures of young ones for quite some time now. This means that there are plenty of re-planted timber forests on Vancouver Island to be logged that are not sensitive ancient rare ecosystems with the last original trees living in them.
The difference is that logging corporations and government entities make about 4 times as much money chopping down the ancient trees, as opposed to the replanted ones. When a logger takes a job to cut down primary old growth they often have to be willing to drive past the hundreds of indigenous people and other forest protectors attempting to block the roads and into “the exclusion zone” (which is the area being guarded by militarized RCMP with submachine guns, tasers, mace and zap straps) to chop down the very last thousand year old trees in existence on the Island. They know exactly what they are doing.
Elizabeth ended with another Christian expression of love:
You are an idiot and under educated and blocked. This is an abuse free zone, and stupidity is abuse.
Gavin isn’t the only recipient of this love-until-it-hurts. Frances Leader writes:
Unfortunately, I tangled with Elizabeth Nickson myself recently and she did not come over as particularly agreeable to my challenge. You may find that she dishes out a mean brand of bitchcraft….
She said that it was obvious I had not had any ‘training’ and my writing is infantile. She said I needed an editor!
I wrote back that I have no desire to write like a main stream stenographer for the CIA…. and she blocked me! 🤣😂
If you are not already reading Uncensored by Frances Leader, you owe it to yourself. She’s a treat!
obama’s paragliders
I was intrigued by Elizabeth’s stance for local sovereignty, which is the purpose of my economic model in How to Dismantle an Empire. We had some friendly exchanges regarding her book on MK-Ultra mind control experiments, which I read. But it was this article where I unsubbed her:
As the culprit for Oct 7, Elizabeth blames—not Hamas, not Israel—but Obama:
October 7th was designed, gamed, and triggered. It was meant to hide their disastrous government. … Trump rises in the polls with every regime attack. Parents have never been more activated.
This is Obama’s game. His people did it. This is how arrogant he is. He needs war to win the next election. He needs war to escape the devastation of his reputation, to save his “legacy”. And he hates Israel. So he’s launched a color revolution to take down Bibi, and break Israel’s legerdemain in science, business and near everything else. Swamp the country with guilt and brutalize its people. …
Obama is a criminal. Biden is a criminal. The Bushes made their money on Jewish slaves at Auschwitz and financing the Nazis. Once you have done that, there is no goodness in you. It’s all lies and corruption and you can’t even see the good. You serve Lucifer.
She sees the purpose of Oct 7 as inflicting mass trauma on all of us, writing:
The past decades have seen one collective trauma after another, beginning with the JFK assassination. … all used as psychological warfare, launched on innocent citizens, meant to reduce us to dependence on a malignant government. October 8th’s beheaded babies, old lady hostages, videotaped rapes, children in cages were meant for every single one of us.
It’s curious that she starts with the assassination of JFK since I’ve been reading Laurent Guyenot on Israel’s connection to it.
Elizabeth says that she was raised with "a reverence for Jewish people because my father had been put in charge of a concentration camp—“a work camp, not a death camp”, he would say—after the war." When he would say, "I saw things ..." and trail off, Elizabeth inserts a photo of a pit filled with naked, emaciated dead bodies to show us what he 'probably' saw.
If Elizabeth’s father was in charge of a concentration camp AFTER the war, who was in it? Certainly not Jews. US soldiers liberated the Jews, right? Why would they be there after the war? Elizabeth’s father could never have been in charge of a German concentration camp during the war. As those who’ve done the research know, these would be Germans who filled the camp and whose naked emaciated bodies would have been in those pits.
I commented in the thread:
… tell me more about your dad. My dad fought in WWII but he would have been over 100 now. I don't think your dad was lying when he called them work camps. Something happened that isn't what we've been told. I don't know what that was, but I know we haven't been told the truth.
Speaking of which, there were no beheaded babies. This one of mine quotes Max Blumenthal debunking that: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/profiteering-and-propaganda-israelhamas and on the old ladies as hostages, my recent one has a link to the released hostage who talked about how nice they were to them: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/authority-palestine-and-gabor-mate. The footage of kids in cages were Palestinians from 3 yrs ago, it's Israeli soldiers who are laughing at them. Vanessa Beeley has a lot of evidence on this.
Last, Obama is a puppet of Israel. Operation Cast Lead, the 22 day assault killing 1400 Palestinians, happened just before he took office. He said he couldn't intervene because he wasn't yet President but that didn't stop him from bailing out the bankers. So Obama golfed while Gaza burned. And it ended on the day of his inauguration. Does that seem coincidental to you?
Elizabeth didn’t reply.
guantanamo goes to college
Elizabeth, however, has outdone herself in Campus Protesters are straight up Nazis. She writes:
[I] am frankly on the side of the Jewish people. But enough is enough. What is happening is anathema, tragic, and very very wrong. Those stupid stupid kids protesting? Why on earth do we let them trash the campuses, and cleave to evil? “From the river to the sea” is genocidal. … we allow hundreds of thousands of hate-filled marchers on our streets? Who believe the same thing about Jews as Hitler? How is that in any way, acceptable?
Trust me, most of us—upwards of 90%—think the way I do. Only 5% of us are actually anti-Semite. It is our leadership, riven with cowardice and appeasement that lets it continue. …
Where would we be without the Jewish people? I’ll tell you, a lot poorer, and vastly less evolved. Pound for pound they have contributed more to humanity than the rest of us put together. The Persians or whatever they call themselves? Vastly less than any other race. What they have brought in my lifetime is murder, death, horror and fear of financial collapse. They farm our horror for cash.
Where to begin? Elizabeth declares her allegiance and reconfigures the facts to fit. Those protesting genocide are genocidal. To go against genocide is to be a Nazi. To march against genocide is to be hate-filled and cleave to evil.
When a journalist says, ‘Trust me,’ they’ve abdicated that role. Either you think like Elizabeth or you’re an anti-Semite—those are the two options. For a moment, I thought she meant our leadership wasn’t sending enough military aid to Israel, but her link condemns academic leadership for not brutalizing their anti-genocide students.
She would be proud of the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor who brought in over 300 riot police from campuses and cities all over California for a nine-hour assault on protesting students, beginning at midnight. Elizabeth may have vicariously bestowed some of that Christian baton-wielding love, sending a number of them to the emergency room:
Protesters sustained battered ribs, concussions and other head injuries, nerve damage, sprained wrists and other extremities, severe bruising, and wounds related to zip-tie use, including lacerations requiring stitching. Students who were present on the scene as emergency medical technicians and first aid responders furnished trained medical care to injured protesters. At times, however, they were impeded from doing so because of the incessant police assaults on captive protesters. All frontline student medics were arrested. …
Another community member was beaten with a bag over their head until they passed out. Videos show them struggling to hold their own body upright as they were put into a police vehicle and refused timely medical care. Witnesses said the bag also led to their suffocation and that the individual vomited as a result. Witnesses shouted for the bag to be removed. This protester later reported having been concussed and needing to seek treatment in the emergency room as a result of being assaulted by the police.
hanging the moon on evil
It’s the Muslim for whom Elizabeth reserves her choice hate, while reversing it, natch:
What they contribute is their hate for us and our culture—one of the pillars of which is the Hebrew faith—as demonstrated all spring on the streets of every city. And they want to outbreed us and turn women into slaves and terrorize the rest of us.
In the towns they have taken over, they slaughter animals in their back yards and toss the carcass into the trash or the ditch behind their house. And the endless wailing from their loudspeakers in ancient English villages like Chelmsford? An act of civil disorder and contempt for the host culture. The intelligent among them do nothing to stop the hate and madness; they hide. There is no equivalence, zero, between Muslim and Jewish culture.
Jews beat everyone in IQ tests, and that means a lot to Elizabeth. She’s dated Jews for years. I assume when she says we’d be a lot poorer without the Jews, she’s speaking from experience—that’s not my experience or statistically true since every concentration of wealth has to be taken away from a distributed population.
She continues:
Of course, Jews are over-represented at the top of every profession. And yes, evil Jews can be spectacularly evil. But it isn’t a cabal, it’s just that if you are smarter than everyone, you can hang the moon when it comes to evil.
Jews are not over-represented at the top of professions that do useful labor, like farming, logging, construction, or plumbing. They are at the top of professions that make the most money from other people, with the least amount of physical labor.
And could Elizabeth name those spectacularly evil Jews? She certainly didn’t here. And what behavior qualifies as evil so we can apply her definition uniformly?
hate sells
I started this article believing that Elizabeth was dedicated to helping communities but mistaken in some of her beliefs. I now think she was a liberal journalist taking on the establishment when it was fashionable and profitable, and has now gone back to her roots of being the establishment.
Her ‘campus protesters are Nazis’ stance is parroted from the appropriately named Dana Bash on CNN. Caitlyn Johnstone points out that Dana’s surname is from her first husband who became chief of staff for the CIA and Pentagon. And CNN staff have leaked to the Guardian that they are pressured to report from a pro-Israeli bias.
Elizabeth’s biases, which are as full of hate and ugly stereotypes as I’ve ever seen, seem to come naturally to her. She is a cheerleader for hate and calls it Christian love. Nothing sells like hate, especially when cloaked in superiority.
What isn’t an easy sell are solutions. Why did British Columbia sell—not only its assets—but the right for someone else to take them, in order to provide two services to themselves—education and healthcare? People in BC were the teachers and the doctors. Why do you need exports to buy the labor of your own population? And why do far-flung ‘investors’ own the labor of logging communities? They haven’t lifted a finger except to issue orders to slash and raze while they can.
A blurb on Elizabeth’s bio page reads:
Elizabeth Nickson’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood biopic: A Westmount exile, who rebels against power and privilege, becomes a globe-trotting leftist journalist chronicling the great revolutionary narratives of her time. Then she sets out to discover the awful truth about her patriarchal 400-year-old colonist clan and everything changes. But Hollywood won’t touch her script because what she finds are eternal truths, about love, charity, sacrifice, Christianity and genuine freedom.
Let’s title that biopic: To See the Forest, Get Rid of the Trees.
Or how about: The Money Puzzle Tree: How to Profit from Hate & Destruction. The synopsis: just call hate love, call those who oppose genocide genocidal, and blame conservationists for destroying our natural heritage. That should do it.
Recipes for Reciprocity by Gavin Mounsey
I ‘met’ Gavin on Charles Eisenstein’s comment thread and have been grateful ever since. I recently posted there that he was a prime example of tonic masculinity, a term I coined as the healing version of manliness, not gender-neutral but gender-positive. My classic example of tonic masculinity would be Wendell Berry, another farmer-poet. This is my favo…
Conjuring your i-land in a mind without borders, this episode is how to mage our heartlands into existence. Uses Sane Francisco's 50 Shades of Beige, What's in a Name, Really? for the AI Extravaganza, Victory Palace on ImageNation: the Only Nation, Charles Upton on Can AI Write Poetry? and Gavin Mounsey on nature as the oldest scripture.
In the beginning was the story, and the story was good vs. evil. I challenge this story and how judgment keeps us divided instead of changing the system preying on us all. I convey Mary McLaughlin's journey from liberal to outcast, and how it changed her view of 'the other side.' I end with The Alchemist on soul contracts as dimensions of our self that change with each person, and how a true friend is one where you like the dimension they bring out in you.
Yes Elizabeth Nickson is a Zionist running interference for I’real.
In addition, every EN article I have scanned contains references to her (generational) wealth and her salubrious surroundings including episodes of schmoozing with the rich and famous. Mind numbing.
She also makes sure you understand that, unlike other highly successful families, hers were principled and motivated solely by good deeds.
I suspect that like all other highly successful families, hers were also Freemasons.
If she was ever ‘on the left’, she certainly kicked that into the long weeds.
hola, tereza. an interesting read for sure. (my 'home' province for 47 years was BC.)
i have found en to be a ranter and that always brings a question mark to me. and, sometimes, a kind of peek into what might be going on in the collective shadow as expressed by any particular rant. and so i am an intermittent reader of her absurdistan.
as to the use of logs to supply bc with education and medical care: that *may* have been true to a significant extent from the 50s and perhaps into the 70s because the 'need' to pay big pharma hadn't yet reached fever pitch along with the successful promulgation of the poisonous ideology of profit maximisation. the late 70s and early 80s saw the successful infiltration of greed is good business ethics, which now i consider to be likely part of the plan that successfully replaced the non-corporatist government of canada with corporatists and corporatism at the same time. and the news also skewed towards pro-business greed as good ethics.
anyway, once the corporatist government was in place, the corporations applied for tax exemptions and got them because they argued that they are the great benevolent (welfare fed) capitalists who were the economic backbone of the country. and economic wellbeing became the the the sole heart and soul of our nation. and at the same time labour cost minimisation came into full force. that included the very active breaking of unions, reducing wages by maximisation un-benefited temporary and contract workers, reducing the sizes of workforces etc.
note: i have a lot of problems with unions, especially after attending some of their absolutely absurd and distressingly stupid meetings. it was while attending them that i realised that greed is more stupefying than sex because all that the owners of everything need to do is give labour just enough money to buy beer, enjoy some sports and not be killed during work, and unions will not formed. no sane person wants to struggle with that kind of organisation and being with stupid people when it is much more fun to watch sports, drink beer and have some sex now and then.
greed is so stupefying that it always wants more, such as the painting of fire exit doors on a chinese toys r' us factory that killed 250 people when a fire in fact did happen - that wasn't put into the news in the early 90s. and of course, to maximise profits the manufacturing sector fled north america.
so... the corporations reduced or didn't pay taxes. bombardier, for example was a canadian model of a very modern corporate goodie: and at one point it owed 8 billion in back taxes that they expected they would never pay and i suspect that they didn't. i have other examples of this that i came across while researching my economics debunked writing and course. and corporate welfare became a huge cash grab! for example, i talked with loan manager of the toronto domionion bank who describes how her bank, and others, had manipulated a small business government financial assistance plan and gutted it.
what does this have to do with school and allopathic health: the middle class tax base had been decimated by corporate anti-labour practices including outsourcing manufacturing; corporations largely stopped paying taxes; corporations became highly subsidised; and things like leasing fees for access to log crown lands were ridiculously low. what was the effect? suddenly the government couldn't afford to maintain the schools or hospitals. the country's (and its province's) wealth had been transferred to the corporations.
from where did school and health get their money? hospitals started charging usurious value added tax fees such as in parking lots, their cafeterias and luxuries like having tvs in hospital rooms. they closed wards, sometimes permanently, and began to use hallways for overflow. and they began to rely on lotteries, big scale lotteries that eventually resulted in lottery fatigue on top of the horrendous overhead costs of those things. off course they reduced staff, deferred maintenance and began to outsource services to lowest bidders, that saw bc hospitals being fed dreck that was shipped to them from ontario, 4000 kilometers way, etc. ie, it was a controlled demolition of health. oh! and the mba hospital administrators saw their salaries triple or more. hmmmm.
the schools i had more direct access to as a telecom engineer because the two big universities in bc began to condo their forested lands to raise money. i was the engineer who designed the phone system of the one and assisted at times with the other. the universities also deferred maintenance while the senior administrators saw their packages double, triple or more.
and the grade schools stopped expanding and doing maintenance. as i worked with a school board in vancouver, my contact there she said to me that at one time trailers for schools would be an object of shame and now they are announced with pride. and when i taught 'economics debunked' and 'banks skanks' at my local high school, the linoleum had been worn through to expose the wood below. and everything else was in an advanced state of disrepair too. during the course i commented to my students that the quality of repair here represents the level of respect this school is getting from our community because in our age wealth is what we respect and the bestowing of it is how we show that respect. i said that the students of this school are being taught the hypocrisy of our time by having blasted on a nearly weekly basis the words of how important schools were and yet they walk on floors with linoleum that has holes in it. ie, we have bestowed on the school and them the level of our respect: emptiness and hypocrisy only.
and a similar level of hypocrisy existed with hospitals funded by lotteries and value added taxes.
so with en, and her regard as to how logging financ*ed* schooling has fundamentally aligned herself with the hypocrisy of the last 40 years and is dreamily reminiscent about the time before that when it was the proper taxation of corporations along with a significantly large tax base in a working middle class that paid for schools and health: corporations are no longer taxed and are instead subsidised and a substantial middle class doesn't exist to be taxed.
perhaps another example of how our own shadows are easily projected on to people or groups whose structure can hook onto that shadow.
fascinating stuff.