Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party in my head?
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party in my head?
On A Recent Silly Thing
I’ve now uploaded the transcripts of each day of the trial:
If you are curious about what actually happened in the Royal Courts of Justice, London, last Autumn, please take a look. The judgement in the preliminary hearing dated 30th June 2021 can be found here, and the judge’s verdict, dated 8th November 2023, here.
You can decide for yourself whether the judge was fair, or what the real issues were.
There are deeper questions about the status of defamation in the internet age and the meaning of “publication”—how can we compare a newspaper article to a tweet?— as well as serious harm that go beyond my legal capability but I’m sure they’ll come up again in other cases. (Incidentally we had the same judge as the Laurence Fox and the on-going Bridgen v Hancock libel cases.)
I think the trial would make an interesting play. Among other things it contains discussion of art and its interpretation, cartoon frogs, various contemporary philosophers including Nick Land, the LD50 gallery (RIP), voodoo, gaslighting, the meaning and history of antisemitism, Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, and the difference between people who have to work for a living and those who don’t.
Please contact me if you’d be interested in working on turning the trial transcripts into the world’s most pointlessly hard-won script…
[note: I’ve reedited the piece a few times to expand on certain points, make it less rambling, etc. ]
What was Case No QB-2019-003691—Miller and Power v Turner—really about…Politics? Psychology? The meaning of words? Art? Truth? The internet? Which books you should read (or not)? Friendship? Enmity? Money? Law? Hatred? Love?
[Everybody knows what’s really going on, what this is really about]
The only reason I’m writing is because Luke Turner will not let it go. His recent behaviour occurs nine months after the trial ended, after five years of absolute legal insanity. I have said nothing in public since the verdict last year, or before that, for years. If he were really afraid of me, or really thought I was some big scary Nazi, he really wouldn’t be calling me one. If he really believed I was harassing him, he would surely not engage in this kind of provocation and taunting, even.
I don’t know why he’s publishing documents from the case—we could do this too of course, but escalation is not the answer—perhaps he is bored, and unable to start a new work. Whatever the reason, know that he has a choice and has chosen to behave this way. He didn’t have to. He is a moral agent, like everybody else. His words and his actions are not neutral and he is not simply “reporting” on things. These chats did not just drop from the sky. His account of the trial, of our words, is extremely partial, skewed and designed to cause fear and threat, and to damage others. He is, in fact, continuing exactly the same behaviour that we went to court to try to challenge.
I didn’t start this case, but I joined a few months in, after our original lawyers said I also had a case against Turner for defamation (he’d started calling me an “antisemitic art world figure” at this point and sending emails trying to lose me work, as he does to anyone who crosses him, however slightly). I don’t regret my involvement because at the very least, it shows what we are up against, and how particular people operate under the cover-story of “politics”.
In the end, both parties lost their case—we lost our defamation action on serious harm grounds, and Luke Turner lost his harassment claim on the basis that whatever we’d said to him didn’t reach the quasi-criminal threshold. To be clear: the judge did not find that we were antisemitic or anything else, but rather that she didn’t think Turner’s publications had reached the threshold for serious harm. (Partly this was because the only publications we could bring were not as strong as many of the anonymous claims made against us, as the judge notes in her verdict, but more on that later.)
People want to know why we brought the case in the first place. I appreciate it might appear strange, foolish, even—but what happened was Turner counter-filed almost immediately, locking us into a demented hall of mirrors that lasted five years. We proposed walking away many, many times. All we wanted was for Turner to delete his lies—namely that there was a police investigation into Daniel for “death threats” (the police witness confirmed this in court), that Daniel had written an article entitled “Towards a Hitlerian Disability Politics” (which Turner admitted in court he’d lied about) and for Turner to stop claiming that I was complicit in a “violent antisemitic harassment campaign”. These are claims of verifiable fact, not opinion. If someone published something to thousands of people saying you’d killed a cat, and you had not, in fact, killed a cat, and now people were calling you a cat-killer, and refusing to employ or speak to you because you’d “killed a cat”, you’d probably feel justified in asking whoever made the “you killed a cat” claim to take it down. It’s not right to make up stuff about people just because you feel like it or you don’t like them. Everybody knows this.
Turner made these factually false claims repeatedly, in public and at scale. He’d also emailed publishers to try to get them to drop us, emailed hosts for our talks attempting to get them pulled, and was undoubtedly involved in various behind the scenes email campaigns and “open letters”, not least because many of them referenced him (when asked he simply refused to admit involvement. Presumably he thinks that if someone else pressed the send button, it wasn’t him. This is disingenuous and ridiculous). He certainly knew who he was working with. All we ever wanted was for him to delete the claims and for everyone to disappear into the sunset, happily ignoring each other until the end of time.
What happened instead of everyone deleting stuff (we had already deleted our tweets calling him a liar one or two days after getting into it with him) was that Turner instructed his lawyers to send us dozens and dozens of increasingly threatening letters, spending thousands and thousands of pounds each month. He refused to drop hands (i.e. we each pay our own fees) and walk away on multiple occasions. Instead of discussing things, Turner demanded the only way out now was for us to say that we had harassed him (and give him money). We could not morally accept this, because it wasn’t true, which is why we ended up going to trial last year. By the way, if we had accepted his terms, we’d still have been bankrupt and he would have claimed that we had “admitted” we’d harassed him forever. Which would have been even more intolerable than what he’s doing now, which is, to be fair….also intolerable. So early on, he locked us into a case which become increasingly demented over five years, with Turner eventually trying to present 26 ring-binders of “evidence” to the court, including photographs of my necklaces—utterly creepy stuff—and Joe Biden speeches.
Let me be clear: I had NO IDEA who we were dealing with (and I don’t mean this in an admiring way). In the past five years let’s just say I’ve watched a lot of Sam Vaknin videos, which I highly recommend. Andrew Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology is also informative.
I had assumed that a reasonable person who received an email or letter saying that something they’d written was untrue and defamatory would delete the post/tweet/whatever, if not apologise. Certainly in my writing if I get something wrong and someone writes to show how, I delete it, issue a correction and an apology where appropriate. This is not what happened here. On the contrary, the more we tried to find an amicable solution, the more the knot tightened and we found ourselves shackled to a vindictive man who apparently has all the time and money in the world to try to impose his warped vision of the world. And he’s still doing it.
Because we’d brought the claim, even though we couldn’t get out of it and had tried to resolve the case before court, the judge in the end awarded Turner 80% costs. We argued that each party should pay their own costs, which would have been fair as both parties lost, but Turner rejected this and the court ruled in his favour. These were extremely high as he’d spent over a million pounds on the law firm Mishcon de Reya, and had hired a KC, Catrin Evans, to represent him.
After we’d spent the 30K crowdfunder fees on the initial lawyers and ran out of money, we were represented by others working on a CFA (kind of like a no-win no-fee arrangement). We obviously don’t have a squillion pounds (or 80% of a squillion pounds) we were supposed to pay in the end, so Daniel declared bankruptcy, and Turner paid yet more money to force me into bankruptcy recently, even though he knew that he would get nothing, because I have no assets and nothing of any worth (unless you have a valuable first edition, which I do not, books are not counted in bankruptcy!). His lawyers would have informed him that he would recover nothing from me. But he presumably wanted to be able to say that I was “ruined” in public because, well, who can say why he wants this.
But reader—and I’m sorry to my haters, who would like to hear something else no doubt—I’m not ruined. I have my faith, my friends, I have somewhere to live, and food to eat, clothes to wear…and I still have my books! Unlike 2018, when I was cancelled the first time, things are very different now. People know these tactics and they are tired of them. I mean, most people. Cancellation is well understood and deplored.
Do you really think someone should lose their job for some dumb private messages? Do you think you should if someone got hold of yours? What opinions or speculations or interests or idle thoughts do you have, or have had, what jokes have you made, that would put you at odds with contemporary “correct” thought? Do you think you’ll always accord with what the world thinks you should say, or think, or do? Can you still read? Can you still think? Can you still laugh? Can you forgive? Can you move on?
I joined the case a few months in because I thought that what Luke Turner and his “antifascist” friends—smearing, ostracising, losing people work—were doing to Daniel and many others, many of whom were Jewish, and me, who is not Jewish, was wrong. I could see that the more people stepped in to defend others, that they too were becoming the target of what became an increasingly sprawling vendetta in which people were publicly lied about and accused of being antisemites, Nazis, fascists and so on. In the current climate this stuff is—as we can see!—devastating for people’s careers, and pretty much everyone is extremely afraid of being called a bad name (though let us hope that this is dying down: perhaps this is optimistic).
Self-censorship, as many people are aware, is rife. In this context, bad actors are clearly able to manipulate the culture to suit their own psychological needs. Not because what they’re saying is right—we are surrounded at this point by insane and dangerous ideas—but because it’s what people who might otherwise f- you up want to hear. But unless we stand up to authoritarians, we will be bullied into accepting their worldview as our reality. We need courage and a willingness to fight. And, yes, in some cases, perhaps to lose minor battles on the way to a larger victory.
And by victory we mean, the right to speak and think and read freely, to challenge untruths and misrepresentations and to be curious without being shut down by people who use their money to silence, and who seek to shape the world in their image by smearing others. The right to speak together and to pursue the truth. Left authoritarianism is real and serious. We need a proper analysis of what it is and how to confront it.
At the heart of this lies, not politics, I think, but hurt feelings. I think all this is really about a man who could not take being laughed at, however mildly. This man latched onto a larger political worldview, one that has assumed increasing dominance over the past decade or so, to launder minor personal slights. I don’t believe that Turner really cares so much about the political position he purports to represent so much as he saw in it—and its tactics—the opportunity to act out his inability to cope with not being universally admired, and to punish those who did not fully buy his own self-image as victim.
I am not, by the way, saying that Turner has not received abuse, he probably has in the past—but it wasn’t coming from us, nor from any of the other people and organisations he was smearing. By “antisemite” Turner seems to mean not hatred of Jewish people and/or of Judaism, but rather “anyone who ever criticises Luke Turner’s behaviour, however mildly”. We weren’t of course criticising Turner for being Jewish—I didn’t know he was, nor would it have mattered—but for the fact that he was lying and bullying people and refusing to retract his absurd, defamatory and damaging claims.
Others around him seem more obviously possessed of the antifa worldview, and believe that searching out “Nazis” and threatening them with violence, is just and good. This is not a neutral perspective, but an extremist one. Antifa are the shock-troops of the current capitalist order, pushing all the same policies—open borders, transgenderism, the reduction of women to their reproductive capacity, hierarchies of sacred castes, the calumny of nature, hatred of Christianity, drug abuse, prostitution, censorship, doxxing, surveillance—just with added personal menace and violence. The street and online version of state power. The ideological supplement to “I’m the good guy” is of course, “and I’m fighting the bad guy”. I mean, why else would you be attacking women standing up for their rights in the street, for goodness sake? I’m mean, they’ve gotta be the evil ones, right? It can’t be me.
And who are the baddest guys of all? NAZIS!
But there aren’t enough real Nazis to fight (and some of them are on our side, but we’ll make an exception for Azov, or whoever, and for our own authoritarian tactics of course, because we’re the good guys! ). So women who think that sex is real and matters: Nazis! People who want to stop children being medically hurt in the name of the lie that they can change sex: Nazis! Farmers: Nazis! Gammon: Nazis! Incels: Nazis! Weight-lifting: Nazi! Edgy comedians: Nazis! Cartoon Frogs: Nazis!
We know we know we know
This is all very tedious, but I want to respond in brief to the claims of “secret accounts”. They tried this in the trial too. It didn’t work then, but apparently Turner is trying it again now. At some point someone—I don’t know who—drew a picture of myself and Daniel as these cartoon toads. They were called “Nina Groyper” and “DC Groyper” so they were clearly us, and not intended to be “secret” or sinister. They weren’t intended to be anything other than a way of communicating between Daniel and I, as a game. These accounts would have had single-figure numbers of followers. I had no idea anyone that Turner or any of his collaborators were looking at them and taking screenshots. I realise it sounds naive, but six years ago I didn’t how and why people would do that. In 2018, people were making Groypers of philosophers and other cultural figures, e.g.:
I can’t find any record of the one that was drawn of me, but I think it had a copy of One-Dimensional Woman in the background. They were sweet and funny. Turner in his communication with Andrew Osborne, some of which he did disclose, describes them as “theory groypers” and is not at all afraid of them at the time. We deleted the accounts after a few months. I sent a single tweet responding to Turner from the Daniel groyper in 2018. It had one Retweet and Three likes.
Much was made of this one tweet in court (incidentally, I’ve received multiple violent threats and exhortations to kill myself, death dates etc., following Turner’s latest campaign. This, by way of contrast, is not what a threat looks like). I explained repeatedly that Turner and co had at this point managed to get Daniel booted from Twitter, I believe because he’d participated in the NPC meme (remember that one? Pretty important in retrospect—Twitter mods in the pre-Musk era went mental over it and deleted loads of accounts). I saw this tweet from Turner in which he made multiple false claims—namely that Daniel was a fascist and that there was a police investigation into Daniel for death threats made towards Turner.
I knew neither of these things were true, firstly because Daniel was my friend and I know his mind and heart and secondly, because if the police really thought there had been threats of this nature, they would have gone round to Daniel’s house, which I knew they hadn’t. Turner was accusing someone of something criminal in order to defame them—in court we heard from a police officer who noted that they’d dropped Turner’s complaint regarding Daniel because there was no case.
Nevertheless, Turner continued to claim for months after the case was dropped that there was a police investigation. The tweet is a scene from Ken Russell’s The Devils in which Urbain Grandier, played by Oliver Reed, is about to be burned at the stake as a witch. It’s very obvious that I’m saying that this is what Turner is doing to Daniel here. Obvious to anyone who can read an image, that is, or isn’t pretending they can’t.
Before all this nonsense with Turner started, I’d set up a Twitter account for the purposes of researching my book on men, What Do Men Want?, which came out in 2022. Again, it wasn’t a “secret” account, as if I were somehow supposed to inform people (the authorities?) that this was mine, but simply one that I set up to follow manosphere and masculinist accounts, and various others I was interested in—some gender critical, interesting thinkers, artistic people, etc. Just before the trial started, someone that Turner had been communicating with via Signal—that he hadn’t disclosed—sent messages to us that contained a link to most of my gorsedd6 twitter account, cloned by Turner, which we had no idea about.
EDIT: Naturally Turner has now edited the link to show my most “awful” tweets and the parts of our 200+ page chat he things will shame us the most. While I wouldn’t say the same things today in the same way, I’m not ashamed of anything I wrote here, so read for yourself. For context, seeing as it is in such short supply: in 2018 I was unemployed, broke, recovering from alcoholism and being accused on a regular and public basis of being a Nazi, fascist, TERF, etc. I’d lost work and left my teaching jobs because I didn’t want to live in fear of having them taken from me. The by-now dominant ideology on the left—the divisive logic of identitarianism was in full-swing, and anyone talking about class, about economic exploitation rather than cultural oppression was being pilloried as a racist, sexist, etc. I thought the left had gone insane. I woke up one morning and I didn’t recognise the world.
I’d experienced several periods of madness in the proceeding years which were both exhilarating and terrifying. At one point I had this experience of what felt like the “language crystal” exploding and all words felt like shards. I looked at one woman’s face in the supermarket and it was a swirling vortex of stars and broken glass that didn’t go away when I looked back. I heard words and felt every polysemic meaning all at once. I barely slept for months on end. At one point I was so broke I sold a bunch of wires to a second-hand electric shop for £20. It was a depressing time, lightened only by Daniel’s loyalty and friendship. My “power level”, whatever that means, was close to zero, funny.
These are private, ironic and humorous chats between two friends who had already been ostracised and calumnised. We were people you were allowed to hate. Many of my former friends—people I had supported financially and otherwise (when I had a job) had publicly denounced me, such as Linda Stupart, who wrote this horrible piece about me when I was at my lowest. I was angry and upset by what I saw as their betrayal of our friendship. I had realised too late that many of these people were not my friends.
“Toast” as a stand-in for “trans” by the way was a word someone once said to use in public, for fear of discussing the topic openly, because otherwise people would get triggered, ears twitching, checking you weren’t saying anything “wrong”. And there really has been a trans shooter in the years after these tweets. I interacted with people on X occasionally but most of the time the account merely followed accounts relating to my book. Would I publish these chats in public? No. The question is: why did Turner?
We have to fight the becoming transparent, and the becoming hysterical, of everything. It is not good to be without an unconscious and the sea of dreams; it is not good to be without trusted friends; it is not good to be without private outlets for sadness or other negative emotions; it is not good to be without catharsis or humour. I am certain that in private everyone has discussed all kinds of things in weird, edgy, jokey and non-palatable ways that would not withstand public scrutiny. Everyone has code names and words for things, and private jokes. At one point I say “I am not really up on philo[sophy] or [sic—I mean “of”] antisemitism or Judaism at all unfortunately”. If I really hated Jewish people or Judaism, I’d certainly have known a lot more about it, one would think.
None of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve publicly written for magazines, websites, academic journals etc. were invoked in court, and no one has ever tried to suggest that any of my articles, books, poems, podcasts, lectures, videos, reviews, etc. contain any anti-semitism or Nazism, neo- or retro-. Because it isn’t there. And I’ve written regularly for decades. If I’m trying to smuggle in Hitlerian ideas, this is an awfully long and convoluted game I’m playing.
And you know for sure that Turner would have used anything at all, however slight, if he could to prove how evil I am. We know that he and his associates tracked everything we said and did for years and years, like the Stasi, but presumably not paid. Presumably! They still are, as you can see by how my wikipedia page is being edited, and how the links here are being changed to delete dossiers, etc.
[you can find the cloned version of my gorsedd account in the pdf above. It shows that it was used for pictures, stray thoughts, interacting with manosphere accounts, etc.]
Daniel is Jewish. Many of my friends are Jewish. Many of the artists and others who we tried to defend from Turner’s libel were Jewish. All Turner had was guilt-by-association, and that was weak as hell, which is why he lost his claim. He could not use any of these chats in court, by the way, because he obviously didn’t have access to them at the time he was lying about us in public.
The chats were never meant for public consumption. OBVIOUSLY. I didn’t even have a copy of them, they were so long ago and ephemeral to me. Perhaps there’s something more broadly to be said about this sorry attempt to smear me yet again by publishing private correspondence. At the very least, it’s dishonourable. The case is long over. Furthermore, if what I say in the chat is genuinely upsetting, surely it would be better to keep it out of public view. Turner is supposed to be friends with some of the people we say mean things about in the chats. Are they ok about him posting them? Did he even bother to ask them?
Let none of us live in fear of being “exposed”. Let us apologise when we have spoken badly through ignorance, weakness or from resentment, but only to those closest to us, real people, people we love, those we have hurt. There really is no Big Other, there are only our own minds, and those of others. People who get a kick out of denouncing others in public will do so regardless of what’s true. It’s human. It will never cease. But let us at least pull back when we feel the allure of the quick hit, the amygdala mob fix. Are we just relieved that it wasn’t us this time, or did the person really “deserve it” in this case?
This stuff makes people lose their minds. We are downing in a kind of semiosis, signs with bodies, feelings with reason, time without contemplation, reading without understanding, distraction without completion. As Walter Benjamin once described capitalism: a party that never ends—sans rêve et sans merci.
Without naming them, in the past week I saw an expert on scapegoating claim that not all cancellations deserved to be described as scapegoating—sometimes negative consequences were deserved; a woman who prides herself on being above the “culture war” wrote “Sometimes the Witch Hunt Finds Real Witches”; a man who prides himself on his accuracy attacked me while claiming—even after correction—that the case involved an entirely different man who he liked, who shared the name of the person who stood across from us in court. Male leftist theorists pontificated dialectically about where they felt a “red line” could be drawn, while literature PhDs pretended to think that someone joking about being a Nazi was literal and very sincere proof that the person who said that really really was one, honest gov: “she admitted it!”
[Hale, kindly: Who came to you with the Devil? Two? Three? Four? How many?]
I hope there’s a world—this one—in which we can all live more honestly, where we are not afraid to express dark or difficult or frankly insane thoughts and try out ridiculous ideas without being pilloried.
I was not yet a Christian in 2018, though I am now. There’s more to say on these points—transparency, faith, privacy, unacceptable thoughts and feelings, ephemerality, permanence, forgiveness, moving on….I wonder:
Could I love Luke Turner? Could I forgive him?
Yes—the part of him that is in pain and that feels he needs to do this, absolutely.
I deleted the tweets from the gorsedd account when I submitted my book manuscript as I do all my accounts once a project is finished. I knew that Turner’s lawyers had screenshots of the tweets they wanted for the case, so I thought that was it. The few tweets I’d directed to Turner in 2018 I’d deleted a day or two afterwards in any case as I saw no point in continuing to interact with him. They hadn’t been online for years. This was the extent of my apparent “relentless” harassment. Turner’s lawyers later tried to claim I was hiding something by deleting tweets (the account itself still exists), but the whole thing was innocuous, and I know very well that it was pored over for days no doubt for any hint of use for his case.
As for the “you can’t catch me” tweet in particular—seeing as I didn’t know that my account was being surveilled this could hardly be a taunt to those spying on me, but was in fact a stray thought I was having about male deers chasing female does, and thinking about the sexual chase of animals in general. How could anyone else possibly know that? How do these people surveilling me know my mind better than I do? They don’t. They’re insane if they think they do. The desire to misrepresent and spin my words goes so far beyond confirmation bias it exists the Earth’s orbit and lands on a planet called Vindicta, 59 million miles away.
Those who regard us as enemies seek to control and impose the meaning of words. They seek to say “all words and phrases have one meaning and it’s what we say it is”. We have to instead defend ambiguity and ambivalence, difference and the play of signifiers. When symbols and slogans become rigid they often become commands to commit violence. When people seek to stamp their interpretation on reality and force others to adhere to it on pain of social and economic death or prison, they are nothing more than tyrants and authoritarians. Women have in UK in recent years been arrested for saying that men can’t become women, a man for putting up stickers about immigration, and a woman for praying outside an abortion clinic.
This cannot possibly be right.
We later discovered there was a whole dossier [EDIT: Predictably taken down, pdf just below]—thank you, neo-Stasi!—that listed everyone the gorsedd account followed and forensically deduced that a Twitter account that I wasn’t hiding was mine, because I linked to the same things (music videos etc.) on FB and Twitter. Obviously this is not something someone trying to hide a secret evil account would do!
[In this Dossier—my crime of following Claire Lehmann, erm “alt-right writer and editor” m.crumps, a daily G. K. Chesterton account and Titania McGrath (“anti-SJW sockpuppet, recently revealed to be a man”) are duly noted!]
On this note, I must say how much I defend anonymity and pseudonymity: there are many people who can’t say publicly what they really think, and whistleblowers and others must have this kind of protection. Nobody has a right to know who is behind an anonymous account. Citizen vigilante “anti-fascist” researchers can go f— themselves. You’re not good, you’re bored.
As for “Parallax Optics”. In 2018 I was asked by Daniel to participate in an anonymous discussion on cults, which was written online over riseup. You can read the piece here. It’s good I think. The site is in no way “neo-Nazi” or whatever, though, as ever, you can make up your own mind. It contains an interview with an Orthodox Jewish man, and many other interesting articles besides. Even if you think material on there is reprehensible, would you defend someone’s right to think or publish it? If not, think about why, and think about what ideas you have that might one day be deemed beyond the pale.
If your entire politics consists in drawing lines between who you can and can’t call a Nazi/bad person, I suggest this is less a politics than a status anxiety disorder masquerading as a principled stance. I see leftists desperate to make it clear just how abject I am, how appalled they are, but I can also feel their fascination and even a mild envy: what would it be like to be denounced, and afterwards no longer worried about being denounced? To speak freely? For an orgy of cancellation! In the future everyone will be cancelled for fifteen minutes…
The left’s position used to be, by the way, that you would talk to people you disagreed with, so that you could try to win them round to your position, not ostracise and demonise people for not agreeing with you. That way lies alienation and radicalisation. I’m just reading Luke Conway’s new Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left and it’s all about this. Whatever is wearing the left like a skinsuit is not the high openness, anti-censorship, dialogic, pro-expression, funny and playful thing that it used to be. That stuff all went to the frogs, and the left has never gotten over it.
The only consistent position is ultimately to permit people to say everything and challenge them on it using better arguments. No groups or individuals are unmockable. We should not be in the business of creating sacred castes and new hierarchies. And everyone should be able to laugh at themselves when they are an idiot, which is usually quite often. I’ve made mistakes: we all have.
The left I remember was against censorship, against burning books, against depriving people of work. By the way, defamation—deliberately lying about someone in order to smear them—is not the same as freedom of expression. Apart from anything else, lying to smear someone is very bad manners! To reiterate: Turner admitted that he had lied about Daniel writing an article defending Hitler (he even offered to apologise!) and it was apparent that the “death threats” were not seen this way by the police, nor the judge.
Why on earth does Turner have your private chats from 2018?!
In this kind of civil case you’re supposed to disclose anything that’s relevant. We did, and we know that he did not. So we disclosed 200 plus pages of a WhatsApp chat from six years ago in order to show that we were not coordinating to harass Turner in 2018. Remember, he lost this claim, because this is what these chats showed, because there’s barely any mention of him at all. In a civil case you—thankfully—can’t just go round to someone’s house and root through their stuff, it depends upon people being honest.
Turner’s lawyers at one point demanded to know what edition of Mein Kampf I have. Well, it’s this one. The one recommended by my History teacher when we were studying the Third Reich at school. You can buy it on Amazon or in bookshops. Anyone who actually wanted to understand what Hitler thought and how and why Nazi Germany and its genocidal horrors were possible would obviously read it. In our private chats—again, between two friends who were spending a lot of time together as Daniel was kindly helping me recover—we are joking about a lot, not least because back then we were already being called Nazis, as was anyone who went against the authoritarian left’s party line. Daniel was a “Nazi” for trying to stop an art gallery being closed down and I was one for saying that sexual difference exists and matters: I know, pretty Hitlerian stuff.
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but it’s a bewildering experience to be called something you’re not over and over again. After a while you start to think well, am I? I mean, hundreds of people are saying it and we all know that hundreds of people can’t be wrong all at once […] I suppose I should check. I mean, I think of myself as a pacifist, into dialogue and diplomacy, mediation, forgiveness, a defender of ambiguity, humour and ambivalence, and I mean…the idea of supporting a genocide? That’s insane…or being pro-militarism, industrialism, book burning or corporatism…but maybe I’m secretly a Nazi?! I mean, it’s absurd but…In all seriousness, everyone probably should ask themselves if they would have been a Nazi. The truth is most people would have been because most people are conformists to whatever regime they live under.
The people attacking us are conformists. The point is for all of us to understand how deranged political systems and individuals emerge. In order to do this we have to study these things, and understand how people were seduced by violent and insane ideas and people. How else do we stop it happening again? It’s for sure not through censoring ideas or people we don’t like or for drawing “red lines” between us and other people.
There is no doubt that Hitler and Nazism are the dark historical transcendentals of our age. Even this week magazines are putting out tired merged images of Trump and Hitler. [Edit: and for goodness sake, someone tried to assassinate Trump and killed a man in the crowd in the context of the former being relentlessly accused of being Hitler mk II. Words have consequences, as left authoritarians like to say].
We will apparently countenance no other historical reference until the heat death of the universe. In this context, to say “I’m definitely a Nazi now lol” in a message to a friend is manifestly not a confession of a genuinely held political belief (but you know that), but to say in this situation any deviation from the acceptable view will be called Nazi. All these absolute dingbats with PhDs pretending not to be able to read—really? You want people to think you’re either f-ing stupid or that mendacious, or both? Also, I imagine a committed Nazi would have read more than the scholarly introduction to Mein Kampf, which is all I’ve ever managed to do.
If your politics consists in a kind of internal terror of being accused of being a Nazi, and you go out of your way to differentiate yourself from those so accused, you are not thinking, you are capitulating. Ask yourself what “being a Nazi” really means in 2024: does it consist of a set of political positions and a desire to impose those beliefs or does it simply mean person we do not like or person who questions the current ideology on any of its points? Ask yourself what you mean by “Nazi”, and what you are afraid of being called for stepping out of line. Ask yourself how fear is mobilised around signifiers, and ask what your role is or might be in going along with a mob.
And who’s leading the mob, and why? What would it cost you to say what’s true, or to stand up for people being bullied and scapegoated?
I do believe, like any half-intelligent person, that we should all should read and try to understand extreme literature of all kinds—religious books, political manifestoes, hate tracts, “conspiracy theories”, crackpot novels, whatever—but I also believe that no one simply uncritically becomes the last book they’ve read, otherwise all the idiots attacking me would all be The Very Hungry Caterpillar or whatever. Have we forgotten what it means to reflect, to hold different ideas in our head without ever becoming any one of them in particular?
What the people seeking to discredit me and others are practicing is a kind of strategic illiteracy and an anti-intellectualism that seeks to make sure people only read prescribed things in the exact way that they want you to. And generally, to warn people off of reading altogether. This all depends upon demolishing the possibility of the play of words, and of interpretation. Authoritarians also can’t stand friendship and humour, because their relations are characterised by fear, and they don’t know how to relax. Authoritarians are also lazy and dogmatic. We must fight being pinned down by them. We have to stand up for each other against these cry-bullies and monomaniacs.
Ask yourself, by the way, how many of your private chats from any point in your life would withstand scrutiny, let alone by a bad actor seeking to paint you in the worst possible light? Nobody writes silly messages to their friends on WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or whatever imagining that they’d be plastered over the internet years later—and nor should they!
I can’t be bothered to respond to every hysterical bad-faith “interpretation” presented by Turner, but suffice it to say that seeing aliens on the bus was a “real” experience that I had in 2011, when I hadn’t slept properly for seventeen weeks (don’t do it, kids!). I realised it was a hallucination and was immediately whacked on sleeping pills by the Doctor, but it was a very powerful and overwhelming experience, accompanied by paranoia, which is why I empathise with Turner on this point in the trial, because it seems he’s suffering from a paranoid idea of a conspiracy against him, which is a terrible thing for anyone to think. In the chat I’m saying “we talk about human races, but that’s to cover up the fact that there really are fairy and alien races, so ‘race’ itself is a psyop”. This is clearly a ridiculous and delusional claim, which is why Daniel pretends it’s esoteric knowledge in his usual ironic way. Anyone with a brain and a sense of humour understands all this of course, and I can’t be bothered to explain any more. I assume Turner probably try to skew more out of it as he doesn’t seem to be able to stop, but if that’s the best he can get out of 200+ pages…
One aspect of all this that’s clear is that so much of about my having taken a public stand against gender ideology in 2018 and beyond. I’m an apostate, which makes me a useful target for a group of people trying to shore up their own shaky worldview.
Trans rights activists are extremely desperate to make a connection between socially unacceptable politics and the obviously reasonable points made by anyone concerned to protect children and women’s rights, because they think that they can taint the latter by linking it to the former. They’ll no doubt carry on trying to do it via me, and for that I am sorry. It’s very obvious that not wanting people to hurt themselves on the basis of a false idea of what it means to be male or female is not a right-wing belief. It’s not a political belief at all. What’s true is true, for bodies and minds alike, and this whole imposed gender delusion will look crazy and even more tragic than it already is in not very long, I’m sure. I don’t hate anyone, let’s be clear, though I am angry with people who’ve pushed destructive and false ideas at the expense of vulnerable people. I’m angry at arrogant surgeons and lying NGOs and the medical-industrial complex creating new regimes of pain and then profiting off of them.
In her verdict last November, the judge wrote this:
Since the verdict, myself and Daniel, who at the time simply wrote this short note in response to the trial outcome, have carried on working and thinking and have said nothing more about the case. Turner has, for whatever reason, in the last week or so, decided to revive his vendetta. Presumably the outcome last year did not please him enough to return to Bach. Instead he’s relitigating a closed case and pretending he’d won something and proved something he manifestly has not. You would have to ask him his reasons because I have no idea why he doesn’t just move on with his life. His actions are purely destructive, of himself as much as anyone else. As I said all along, I hope he gets help.
Thank you to everyone who messaged me with support—friend and stranger alike—we will carry on thinking, talking, writing and reading for ourselves in the name of truth, humour and beauty, and nothing, not even death, will stop us.
UPDATE:
Daniel has written up his thoughts on all this for IM-1776.
Stan Goff, American anti-war activist and author, has written up an excellent account of the whole situation on his Substack, Molting.
James Robb, a New Zealand worker and writer, has calmly and precisely addressed the trial and the broader economic and social context on his website, A Worker at Large, under the heading Anatomy of a Witch Hunt.
Turner is obviously a maniac and it's shocking that anyone could see him as anything other than, at best, an insecure worm, or, at worst, an evil tyrant hell bent on destroying lives to flatter his own ego.
This is very moving Nina. I follow you only as an admirer of your book, your politics and your mind and had no idea you were embroiled in this legal nightmare.
What a relief it is over for you and what a masterclass on postmodernity it must have been.
I am a visual artist who has been, and still is, cancelled and ostracised by multiple social media and the arts community for refusing to believe men can turn into women and making my view public. Regardless of the pain, loss of time and income I can honestly say having the integrity to stand up for truths sincerely believed in is something only fleetingly regretted on my worst days. It has been worth it to find out with certainty the answer to that question - would I have been a Nazi? - is a resounding and absolute NO.