The Power-Miller-Turner Affair

“Beware the self-righteous man, for he will destroy the world many times over before he sees his folly.” - Stewart Stafford

I’m not a “free speech” advocate. Never have been. Nor am I a “free speech” opponent. This whole question is embedded in a tabular, immaterial Kantian universe which can never fit itself to the ensnarlements, sedimentations, and surprises of unfolding reality. It’s one of those “principles” that engenders flash floods of interminable debate, precisely because the “free speech principle” is inevitably expressed as a quandary ethics, the modern version of drunken sophists yelling at each other in a bar. There’s no language of transmissibility for its partisan antagonists, the potential basis of which was abandoned in the now opaque past. What this principle does do is, sword-like and promiscuously, fit the hand of whomsoever wields it.

For better or for worse—and this too has been unrooted—liberal legal systems are built on this sand. And so, when the free speech principle is dragged into court, it has to be parsed and adjudicated by a third-person authority, hopefully non-partisan, based on ever more granular categorical imperatives, established themselves on the sandy soils of principle and precedent.

It’s not great mystery that whatever we’ve come to revere as “democracy” appears—when seen from above at our particular conjuncture—to be a roller coaster ride on a rotten scaffold.

Given all that disclamation, however, and climbing down now from my metaphysical perch (with the world burning unremarked in the background), liberal law is what we have right now, and within its established logic—which should be taken into account by anyone presuming to apply that law on his, her, or another’s behalf.

This is about a court case that began with one Luke Turner, a wealthy denizen of the “art-world,” who made it his mission—McCarthy-like—to root out ostensible fascists in said art-world, by internet stalking, denunciations, accusations, and professional doxxing.

A lawyer, inadvisably it turns out, convinced one of his targets, an artist named Daniel Miller, to sue him for all this—which happens so routinely now online, that such suits could clog the courts for centuries. But Miller did, and later, his good friend, the philosopher and social critic Nina Power, was convinced to join the suit, which dragged inconceivably on for four years.

I read carefully the written decision of British Justice Rowena Collins Rice in Miller and Power versus Turner (Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, WC2A 2LL, 08/11/2023). This became two cases, when Turner counter-sued, Case 1—the suit—and Case 2—the counter-suit. I will come back to this/these court case(s), which revolved around the free-speech principle as it’s encountered in British law as “free expression.”

In particular, I want to focus on Nina Power, one of the claimants (who lost Case 1), a British philosopher and social critic whose work and career I’ve followed since 2020. My interest in her work began when I discovered her interest in Ivan Illich—an obsession of my own—and in her “cancellation” by the academy for her criticism of what I’ll shorthand here as transgender ideology—something about which I am likewise both suspicious and critical. I’ve had a few brief correspondences with Ms. Power, in which we’ve both agreed and disagreed at various times. She was until very recently a senior editor at Compact Magazine, and she’s been part of a larger and more diffuse conversation that I’ll again shorthand as postliberal.

In fact, I’d just finished reading her book, What Do Men Want?—Masculinity and Its Discontents, when the defendant in this case—Luke Turner—published his own account of the court case and the controversies that preceded it, which ignited a small firestorm in what was being called the “art-world,” renewing and refreshing the public denunciations of Power—now characterized by her online detractor/stalkers as “a Nazi.”

As to “the art-world.” I’ll admit, I have hardly any contact at all with this milieu, being a low-income, non-academic, non-artsy, geriatric army veteran living in a small and unknown Midwestern town. My idea of good art (or art that I like) isn’t Elvis on velvet, but on the other hand, I find a lot of what is called art to be pretentious, self-indulgent, petite bourgeois bullshit. Some of that may be my class antipathies. But I’m not here as an art critic (not my wheelhouse, at all), but as a socio-political critic—something I’ve dabbled in for around 30 years now since I left the Army.

A virtual friend of mine, Canadian socialist Stuart Parker, recently wrote a piece about the insanely unscientific twin political litmus tests of “conservatives” and “progressives,” those being climate crisis denial among the “conservatives” and transgender ideology among “progressives.” While it remains unspoken, for the most part, during all this frooforaw, Nina Power’s expulsion (“cancellation”) from “the left” (she was—and likely still is—a Marxian influenced social democrat) was based on her rejection of the idiocy of “progressives” on the whole gender business—she still thinks men and women can’t (in actual reality) change sex.

Worse still, she has long been advocating a ceasefire in the culture wars so people can take the time to listen to each another and try to thoroughly understand one another before resuming their name-calling/stalking/doxxing hostilities. Once she was declared an enemy by self-righteous progressive scolds, however, the gloves came off, and she was subjected to a form of accusatory declension—approved against all enemies—in which disagreement automatically means (first) you are a bad person, (second) you are a fascist, then (third) your opinions are actually a form of murder. Had Power simply submitted to gender ideology and joined the attack on other gender critical feminists, she’d still be accepted in this infantile progressive scold-culture, and none of this would have happened.

By standing her ground that women are adult human females, then talking civilly with other “enemies,” she had given the progressive Stasi what they needed to draw an imaginary map of her decline into Nazism. The proverbial slippery slope.

At the outset, I’ll say, this lawsuit was bad tactical judgement on her part—based on the entirely predictable judgement, given its precedential antecedents—and that she and her co-claimant were bound to lose. On the other hand, if bad judgement—of any kind—were grounds for punishment, I’d have been drawn and quartered repeatedly from the age of five until I was well into my sixties (the jury is still out on my current status as a septuagenarian, but . . .).

Not that Turner’s actions were defensible just because they were legal. I just watched a true crime account of someone who “catfished” a young man into a state of despair that led to his death; and all they could charge her with was a misdemeanor. Law and justice seldom correspond.

If Turner would have engaged in similar behavior in a bar and gotten his ass whipped, I’d have said, too bad, buddy, but you provoked it, and gotten him an ice cube for his bloody nose. Power’s and Miller’s bad judgement here (suggested, as best I can discern, by a lawyer) was taking this into a legal venue.

Once Turner counter-sued, the case was locked in; and his counter-suit, likewise, deserved to lose, which it did—something Turner’s partisan public account ignores.

Debating art and ideas, contesting the nature of the New Right milieu and its critics or opponents, arguing about free speech itself—about protest and counterprotest, about cancel culture and no-platforming, about calling out and smearing—all this is of the essence of the exercise of the fundamental right to freedom of expression which is protected by law. The law rightly hesitates long before trying to regulate the register of such debates—or indeed of debates involving participants with a shared Jewish heritage [antagonists Miller and Turner are both Jewish] disagreeing about what constitutes antisemitism in the art world. None of this has to be done well to earn the law’s protection. None of it has by law to be done moderately, civilly, fairly, respectfully or kindly. On Twitter, it rarely is. The law protects speech which shocks, distresses, alarms and offends unless, so far as harassment in online exchanges are concerned, it is of an order of gravity which raises it above the general melee and into the sphere of that with which the criminal law could concern itself. (Justice Rice, Miller and Power v, Turner)

I am not judging Miller and Power. We make mistakes. The fact of the matter is, though, that Turner, over months of online harassment, did provoke the whole affair.

First, I need to comment on the Twitter feed of one of Nina Power’s post-ruling defenders, Kathleen Stock. Dr. Stock is also a philosopher, and her politics—as best I can discern—is social democratic and second-wave post-Marxist (i.e., not “liberal”) feminist. Her association with Power has been mostly characterized—at least from public view—by their shared criticism of transgender ideology (and a shared exile from polite society on account of it).

When Stock tweeted, in response to Turner’s viral post-court jeremiad, that Power had done valuable work, she was flooded with literally hundreds of replies claiming that Dr. Power—and by extension (of course) Dr. Stock herself—was a “literal Nazi.” (Some of these people can’t resist attaching the word “literal” to everything as if it provided a kind of phatic proof, like all-caps in a deranged conspiracy rant.) All based on Power’s and Miller’s juridical antagonist, Luke Turner’s, publication of his account of the court proceedings, which was linked extensively to selective and highlighted excerpts of social media commentary by and between Miller and Power, some under pseudonyms and on sites designed, it seems, for the purpose of trolling their tormentors.

As I hope to show, some of these were possibly ill-considered—bad-taste satire (in the vein of drunken joisssance) posted (something overlooked by Stock’s antagonists) in an semi-private atmosphere where they felt no need of explaining themselves to the public.

I’ve read Miller’s stuff, and there’s no doubt he’s part of what is broadly, and often too expansively to preserve any meaning, opposed to what’s left of “the left.” He is not, however, a fascist, and Nina Power is anything but a Nazi, “literal” or otherwise. Miller—like Sascha Cohen Baron, a British Jew—is not above engaging in raucous—if distasteful—satire, including satire which is tongue-in-cheek “anti-Semitic.” (Have you seen Borat?)

Of course, people will pull the decontextualized quotes out on me (don’t bother—I’ve already read them) in a similar resort to partisan proof-texting, to which I can only say, go back and review a basic course in logical fallacies. Goddamn! Get over your-fucking selves.

(1) Someone can be right about one thing and wrong about another. (2) Saying the same thing over and over, or louder and louder, does not make it any more right or wrong. (3) Group consensus is not synonymous with truth. (4) People often say things they don’t “literally” mean. (4) The context within which someone says something is a major determinant of what they mean—the meaning is in the intention of the speaker (that’s Wittgenstein, also not a Nazi).

The latest Twitter mob pile-on of Kathleen Stock (and J. K. Rowling, and every other trans-ideology critic) employing the two-step of declaring Power a Nazi, then establishing guilt-by-association for any and all gender-crits, is precisely the kind of ideological food-fighting promoted by Twitter-X (as the judge suggested) and which has—in some cases—resulted in people losing their jobs and even being threatened and attacked.

As the excerpt from the court findings above shows, the court case revolved around parsing “freedom of expression,” and as such could not and would not adjudicate questions of taste, political legitimacy, or virtuous behavior. The trap that all parties fell into—from this writer’s perspective—is that each side took up that morally promiscuous sword of “free expression.”

Miller facetiously challenged Turner to a fistfight at one point, which probably would have had a better outcome. (I’ll referee if someone buys the plane tickets for Sherry and me and gets us a nice B&B.)

I’m reminded here of people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who—although leaning to the left politically—frequently find themselves defending those on “the right,” on the basis of the principle of free expression, to which they are both committed with an almost religious zeal. I disagree philosophically with their foundational libertarianism, but often find myself in agreement with them, based on their sensitivity to liberal hypocrisies, especially those of the moribund and utterly corrupt American Democratic Party. The problem with “free speech” is that it cuts both ways—as Power, Turner, and Miller discovered at the hand of Justice Rice. I’m also reminded of free speech advocacy, on behalf of actual Nazis, by the ACLU, and of spirited defenses, from the left, of utterly horrible human beings like Larry Flynt and Howard Stern.

You see, what’s being segregated out of the conversation is everything apart from the so-called principle—or perhaps I should say, idol—that actually matters, but which is not—in liberal law—subject to legal adjudication. Like common sense and common decency. Like a charitable attitude toward others. Like basic virtues. Like civility and courtesy. Surely, these are as valuable as some liberal political principle, but all these are eclipsed by politics now. The law—as St. Paul once observed—which is meant in its best sense to serve the ends of justice, becomes progressively more self-referential, more malleable by power, and more likely to exclude the very virtue and justice to which it should bend. Politics becomes a weapon, the weapon to which is universally attributed the sole capacity for the very redemption it has itself foreclosed. This malignant progression, and this genetic flaw at the heart of liberalism is precisely where the postliberal conversation should be focused, but the gravitational fields of power and conflict continually throw it off course. We all, every one of us, remain in the same post-lapsarian situation.

Which his why I find myself in the peculiar position of being the Greenwald/Taibbi here with regard to Daniel Miller, with whose political orientation I’d likely find myself mostly at odds (though I really don’t know). Not because I have suddenly become a liberal (in fact, Miller describes himself in the trial transcripts as a liberal, defending liberal values), but because I find myself almost equally at political odds with the partisans of Turner; and because I find that both Miller and Power are on much more solid ground than Turner et al, regarding proper and productive means of public debate . . . liberal shibboleths about “rights” and “freedoms” aside. Power’s and Miller’s mistakes, in my view, are (1) online imprudence (everyone sees everything) and (2) trying “to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”

Nina Power has been more coy than Miller in public about her political commitments, but, as I said, and inferring from who and what she reads (and writes), as well as a pretty good familiarity with what she has said during multiple panels and interviews, I probably accord with her fairly closely, apart from, perhaps, questions of nationalism. But, even on those, we live in very different countries. (I do share her love of Illich, and I don’t share her love of Bataille. It is what it is.) I know she repeatedly criticizes capitalism as a fundamentally destructive system in her book. Amen.

With all this prefacing, perhaps it’s time we buckle in for the events that led to the latest cancellation of Nina Power. First, I need to confess, as a friend posted something about it, and with my first scan of the Turner account, I was myself tempted to find the door. It’s a reaction, maybe even a conditioned reflex, to run from any association with Nazis, for God’s sake, and the decontextualized material present in that account was—in the absence of its own genealogy—repulsively alarming. It took a beat, and a careful review, as well as an internal caution against jumping to conclusions, to self-correct.

Without that self-correction, the internet is a kind of Giradian nightmare. (And the owners and operators of the internet know goddamn well that today’s culture does not form such virtues—quite the contrary. Mobs are more monetizable. Self-control is not.)

“Watching Kathleen Stock,” my unnamed acquaintance said, “and some ‘chair of the Edmund Burke foundation’ at Cambridge leap to her defense (clearly having not read the ruling or seen the evidence exposed) and accuse progressives of cancellation, when it was Power and Miller who brought the libel suit that unmasked them, is exemplary of the bullshit projection of so many reactionaries. How does concern about transgenderism lead one down a path like this? What have trans people done to make neo-fascism appealing? This just seems so unhinged.”

To which I had to reply:

“I’m in the middle of writing a novel (hopefully) and don’t want to get sidetracked. I’ve only skimmed what's going on, even as I’m looking over her book [What Do Men Want?]. I can see an inkling of what's going on here, but I don’t want to open my mouth until I’ve had time to reflect (and do more research, all I can find right now is Turner’s stuff). Lots of knees will jerk with this, and there will be a strong temptation to inject partisan guilt-by-association fallacies.”

I contacted Nina Power shortly afterward, and she sent me the full court transcripts, as well as some background, for which I’m very grateful. (She has also linked them in her brief response to Turner, here.)

***

Beginning at the beginning. (Not really, but a good starting point.)

An independent British art gallery (in the Hackney District of London), called LD50. Referring back now to my earlier note on my own standing with regard to “art-world,” I could easily dismiss it as a tempest in a teapot. But this little cultural niche, like all little cultural niches, and like Camus’s Daru, cannot insulate itself from the sturm und drang of larger society. In the same sense, then, the larger society cannot prevent the pond ripples of specific cultural phenomena—in this case rippling through the proxy culture war that rages across the faux-democracies of what we call The West (even when it includes places like Australia). And so, while I’d like to dismiss it as a tempest in a teapot, it does—like many other things I’d love to avoid or dismiss—actually matter.

The LD50 gallery, like most artsy things nowadays—is addicted to “the edge,” to clickbait, to “innovation,” to provoking, titillating, playing to that incessant desire for something different. This will always attract controversy, in part because that’s what it’s intended to do. (I know of a performance “art” event in Miami some years ago that was a woman pulling an American flag out of her ass to the beat of a drum.)

In early 2017, LD50 hosted a show from various “transhumanists” (some identified with the cultural “left”), for example, and then later that year, it “hosted” a Skype-thing (not even in the gallery) featuring people who identified as new-right, alt-right, neo-reactionary (brand=NRx) thinkers.

The gallery, in other words, had no political commitments of its own, but served—in the ugly language of the digital age—as a kind of platform. Nonetheless, a cultural posse was organized to not only protest the Skype conference (of like ten people), with a small exhibition of associated art, but to actually shut down the gallery, for good. The gallery was characterized as a “fascist” art gallery, which attracted the attention of the media and turned the online protest into a feeding frenzy and an actual physical blockade of the gallery.

Lucia Diego, a Spanish artist and the gallery’s Curator, had stated more than once that her intention in hosting various events from multiple perspectives was to promote dialogue and understanding. Diego says her politics is pretty center-of-the-road, neither “progressive” nor “alt-right,” though she’d attracted the ire of some that same year (2017) by disagreeing with aspects of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s actions against the Trump travel ban (a policy with which I myself disagreed, but this is not about the rightness or wrongness of a policy).

When the “NRx event” was announced, Sophie Jung, a London-based Swiss artist, attacked Diego and the gallery on her Facebook page, whereupon the attacks went viral and caught the media’s attention. Diego herself was, along with the gallery, quickly maligned as a '“fascist.” “Fascist” gallery. “Fascist” Curator.

Once she and the gallery were—with the help of the media—designated as fascists, it became open season. She received a flood of hate mail, had to change the “event” from public to private (Facebook followers only), and was forced to stay in her house for five days by “anti-fascist” protesters who threatened her with violence. The gallery was vandalized and spray-painted with swastikas.

Even the Mayor of Hackney joined the frenzy, and then the landlord (concerned about more vandalism) evicted the gallery. So, libelous claims, threats, mob action, and violence prevailed.

“It was the first time we’d displayed anything political before,” said Ms. Diego, “It was just because it was happening online over the last year and we find it very interesting that all these online platforms were discussing this idea, so we thought we’d curate a show that studies what’s happening online. People are also angry that we hosted talks in the gallery by some alt-right figures. But instead of listening to the talks the speakers gave, they are looking at these people’s biographies and trying to find the most outrageous thing they’ve said or done in the past.”

This theme, of dialogue, of listening to one another, will recur throughout, because this is exactly what Nina Power has, for years now, been promoting as an alternative to the kind of scorched earth culture war that sees targeting people’s personal lives, safety, and livelihoods as legitimate, once they’ve been branded an enemy person.

It was a short leap from the “fascist” slander to “Nazi.” And we all know that it’s always okay to punch a Nazi.

Returning to the violent protests, one counter-protester appeared: Daniel (DC) Miller. He was holding a cardboard sign that read: “The right to openly discuss ideas must be defended.” The protesters ripped the sign from his hands and destroyed it. Apparently they disagreed. (On the back of the sign, it read: “Stand up to violence and intimidation.” They apparently disagreed with that, too.) They then pushed and dragged him away from the site. He was subsequently attacked online and subjected to further threats of violence. At the time—and he explained this at the court hearings—he was doing research on the alt-right, trying to understand the whole phenomenon instead of merely denouncing it. He does not count himself a member of the alt-right or the neo-reactionaries (I believe he counts himself as a conservative, idk, much as my own father did . . . he wasn’t a fascist either.)

That was all in 2017. In 2018, Luke Turner came onto the scene here with a libelous article titled “Towards a Hitlerian Disability Politics,” in which Turner falsely claimed (and was forced in court to admit he had lied about) that Daniel Miller had endorsed state euthanasia for the disabled. This was the inauguration of Turner’s crusade against Miller (and, later, by association, with his close friend Nina Power). Turner would knowingly make other false claims (noted below), because his campaign against them wasn’t to persuade anyone about ideas, but to destroy the reputations of people with whom he disagreed, and whose actual beliefs he’d never actually tried to discern. He was joined in this unhinged campaign by the so-called Catholic convert (speaking now as a Catholic convert myself) Shia LeBeouf—an actor who’d portrayed a kid in a war between giant toys and as an adult in pretentious porn (Nymphomaniac). LeBeouf once messaged Nina Power, saying “You fuck third positionists [another synonym for fascist/Nazi]. You defend them. You are them.”

I know that Miller and others now refer to their stalker antagonists as “the left,” which is a pet peeve of mine, being in most respects an Olde Tyme leftist of long standing (meaning an advocate for economic measures that favor the working class and the poor and having a strong critique of capitalism). Apparently, common use and the neoliberal co-optation of language are defeating us brontosaurs, by the redefinition and weaponization of this term, left, for the culture wars. Many of the worst of the fake “left” culture warriors are the very opposite of anti-capitalist and have no connection whatsoever with the working class or the poor—or even with some of the “oppressed” groups they reify for the purpose of portraying themselves as their champions, or “allies.” Nonetheless, I’ve overlooked my linguistic peeves with Miller here, because we both know who he’s talking about.

Their tactics are politically short-sighted and fundamentally dishonest, not to mention plain unethical. Turner is a liar. He and his confederates tell lies, spread innuendo, cyber-stalk, and smear. I was shocked by how quickly some of my own acquaintances—including Christians—jumped on the Turner account of this whole affair before they even had the whole story . . . and re-transmitted it over the internet. It took me about thirty seconds reading Turner interlinked post-court attack to begin suspecting it might be nothing more than the biased and selective continuation of an obsessed crusade to cause as much damage to the lives of two people as he possibly could.

This is how internet mob actions develop. That fucking SHARE button is a high explosive that children have discovered in the shed.

At any rate, one of the smear tactics used to paint people like Nina Power as a Nazi is to root around the web looking for anything to further paint her as unsound, deviant, and dangerous . . . in other words, carrying a zombie infection that calls for her virtual destruction. It’s not hard to do, and it’s effective—as a thoroughly unprincipled tactic—against anyone.

Nina Power has a past. I write that as someone who also has a past, to which I’ll compare hers. To wit, she struggled with alcoholism and mental illness issues associated with a police attack on her life partner that nearly killed him, after they spent two years in court to get police charges dismissed that would have imprisoned him for daring to be attacked by cops. She did some things, for which she apologized publicly and privately, when she was in her cups during that period (now more than a decade hence), but her “sins” are readily cited still today in spite of time, change, and repentance.

I, on the other hand, destroyed people, property, and the environment for a living for more than twenty years, and caused untold pain and suffering to myself and others at home with my addictions and obsessions; and yet—at least when I was part of the right in-crowd—I became their redemption fable.

There’s a double-standard for men and women, but there’s also a double-standard for in-crowds and out-crowds in today’s poisonous digital discursive atmosphere. I remember Paul Kingsnorth saying once that the “woke” wanted Christianity (preferential option for the “oppressed”), but without God and without forgiveness.

Power’s past figures into her reactions during these developments, as well as into some of the intemperate, as well as privately whimsical, things she said in response to the accusations that she/he/they were and are “literal Nazis.” I don’t expect to see the repentance for these kinds of internet mob pile-ons anytime soon, because the perpetrators are puffed up with self-righteousness and the belief that they are the warrior-saviors of reified pet categories of the oppressed.

When she was at a psychological bottom, Daniel Miller helped her, personally, to get sober, to recover, to put her life back on track. As a result, they became “best friends,” (her words). Not politically identical, but friends. It’s different.

In Turner’s obsession with them, he repeatedly and publicly attacked a Jewish man (Miller) for antisemitism, attacked a woman whose best friend is a Jew, and spread the lie that they were both anti-Semites/Nazis. He and his internet posse made a mission of cyberstalking their venues and trying to get people to cancel events with them and other people to protest them—based on these lies.

The (admittedly ill-advised and ill-prepared) court case brought against Turner, the settlement was not—as Turner now suggests—some kind of vindication. He was and apparently remains a dishonest, obsessed, self-righteous asshole . . . who by the way also commands a great deal of wealth, which translates into actual power. The case was decided against Miller/Power based on an arcane precedential legal technicality, in spite of there being a mountain of evidence that he and his cyber-confederates were engaged in a campaign to disrupt their lives and interfere with them making a living. He almost crows about them being bankrupted by the court’s order (a British legal quirk) that, having failed (based on this legal technicality) to convict Turner, they would have to foot the bill for his very expensive legal fees.

Among the outright and brazen lies perpetrated by Turner was that Daniel Miller had leveled death threats against him, and that these death threats had been investigated by the London Metropolitan Police. This was an absolute and intentionally defamatory lie, which was—of course—quickly taken up by Turner’s high-brow internet posse. In the court transcripts, we see Turner’s attorney (he had three) questioning Nina Power about a response posted on Twitter X.

EVANS (Turner’s attorney): I think we are becoming familiar with this. This is two tweets. The first one is from Mr Turner, 18 October. This is the first tweet that you are suing him for libel in relation to, is it not?

POWER: I am. [correction] No.

EVANS: Sorry, Mr Miller is. In this action this is the first tweet, known as tweet one. I make that clear. I am not saying you are. It is responded to, however, by you below, is it not?

POWER: Yes.

EVANS: And you can see that it is because it says “replying to Luke Turner.” Now, in the Part 18 response which we looked at just before the short break, which you had to withdraw and accept was wrong, it had included a sentence that describes that image in your tweet as conferring and appearing intended to convey an impression that is in visually aggressive terms. That is a good description of that image, is it not?

POWER: I wouldn’t say so. I mean, I can explain it, what it means, and why I [interrupted by Evans]—

EVANS: No, do not do that, thank you, but you yourself signed that response that described this in the way I have just read out. This is what you were saying, signed with a statement of truth. You said it conveyed and appears intended to convey an impression in visually aggressive terms. That is when you were not admitting it was you behind it.

POWER: No. Impression that? Okay. I don’t really understand that sentence. The scene in the film is of the persecutor, the religious guy, holding a cross over this man, Urbain Grandier, in the film, who has been falsely accused of things he hasn’t done, of witchcraft actually, and at this point Mr Miller is not on Twitter because he’s been banned. I feel compelled to stick up for him using his account, which is what I have, not because this account is for that purpose; it’s to communicate with Daniel. I see this tweet from Mr Turner saying that Mr Miller is under investigation by police for making death threats. I know that this isn’t true. I know that Daniel hasn’t sent death threats. I know that the police haven’t contacted him or me or anyone, which they would do if they were taking a death threat seriously, and I’m saying that what Mr Turner is doing is the equivalent of the persecutor character in the film The Devils, which is based on this novel by Aldous Huxley about a real event in France.

EVANS: Do you agree that someone receiving that image who does not associate it with the film would see that it was a man who was being tied to the stake, a stake being a method of murdering somebody?

POWER: Well, I assume people would know the film, to be honest.

EVANS: Can you answer my question. If someone [interrupted by Walker, Power’s attorney]—

WALKER: Well, she was just trying to, to be honest.

EVANS: (To the witness) If someone does not know what the film is, would they see that as a man being tied to the stake?

POWER: Well, it’s partly that. There’s also the hangman behind the Oliver Reed character and there’s also the persecutor with the cross, you know, harassing this innocent man—innocent of the charges he’s been accused of, which is what I’m saying, because Daniel's being accused of death threats where there are no death threats and that there’s no police investigation.

EVANS: So you are sending a death threat back.

POWER: No. This is not a death threat. I’m saying that this man, this persecutor, is the equivalent of what Mr Turner is doing to Mr Miller. That’s what the image means. I mean, clearly that’s what it means.

Yes, Counselor, and which would be readily apparent to a wealthy, highly educated art maven whose globe-trotted all over the world to hang out with other arty-world types. Stop with the reaching. You’re embarrassing yourself.

The whole transcript reads like this, and is remarkably different than what is portrayed in Turner’s account. In fact, both Miller and Power make Turner’s attorney look like a monkey fucking a football on several occasions. As an avid consumer of Brit legal and crime dramas, I couldn’t help but imagine—as I read them—some of my favorite British actors playing the parts in a courtroom spoof.

EVANS: The language is, again, extremely aggressive and unpleasant, is it not?

MILLER: The language, I think is proportionate to the activity that the defendant had previously engaged in with respect to Deanna Havas. The defendant had instigated an in fact, successful campaign to destroy Deanna Havas’s life on the basis that she had liked an image of cartoon frogs, which had no antisemitic content whatsoever. Now, I think that was morally wrong, what he did, and my language in this tweet reflects my belief on that matter. Once again, personally, I would rather be accused of being a grotesque individual than being accused of being a Nazi or an anti-Semite or a fascist because those words have a different meaning in the milieu in which the defendant operated. They actually caused violence against someone. These statements are my feelings about what the defendant and his associates, far-left activists, violent far-left activists, have done to Deanna Havas, were in my opinion, nothing.

EVANS: Well, you have to be careful there because there is no evidence in this case that my client has been violent. So, you need to be very careful about the allegations that you are throwing around. Your counsel will not make that allegation, I suspect, because it is not pleaded, and it is not in the evidence.

MILLER: Your—

MR WALKER (MILLER’S ATTORNEY): Was there a question?

MS EVANS: It does not need to be a question. It is a reminder. There is a lot of (inaudible)

MR WALKER: My understand is—forgive me, but I am not sure it that is a submission to, my Lady, or that is a question to the witness, who is being cross-examined, and the purpose, as I understand it for cross-examination, is to allow the witness to respond. “You need to be careful” . . . How is the witness supposed to deal with that observation. I simply make that point, which I think is valid.

MRS JUSTICE COLLINS RICE: Thank you. [to Evans] Let’s focus on the questions.

MS EVANS: I have got one more question on page 880. Do you accept that that is a threatening or intimidating email—tweet for somebody to receive?

MILLER: Well, it doesn’t—

EVANS: Just yes or no.

MILLER: No, I don’t accept, it is not a threat.

EVANS: Can we turn over to 884, please. This is another tweet from you, 4th of August, the same day, it seems to be 2.30 in the morning, although as I said yesterday the time clock is not always dead on. You say, “I am so tired of this guy—for a week now he’s been engaging in a malicious, vindictive ... campaign.” And so forth. I assume that’s about Mr Turner.

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: So this tweet is directed at him too.

MILLER: Well it refers to him, he is “this guy” in this tweet, yes.

EVANS: You say you are so tired at that point, suggesting that this was a bit of a game to you, I suggest?

MILLER: No, it doesn’t say that it is a game, it says that I find this activity also extremely boring in a certain way and exhausting because, you know, all of this has been blown up for so little. All she [Deanna Havis] had done is liked this image, that’s all that she had done. The Defendant in response had instigated this campaign against her, attempted to destroy her life and actually succeeded in doing that.

EVANS: Could we go over to 886, the same day, 4th of August, the same night. We think it is between 2.30 in the morning and 11.30 the next morning. This is a photo of Mr Turner, isn’t it?

MILLER: It’s his phone profile image.

EVANS: This is a tweet from you with the photo in it?

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: You say, “Look into these cold, black eyes and tell me that @Luke_Turner has a soul.” He is tagged there?

MILLER: Uh-huh.

EVANS: You would have expected that that would go to him?

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: But reference to, “cold, black eyes” is redolent of some of the images that we looked at yesterday, is it not, which I suggested to you were often used in anti-Semitic contexts, people without souls?

MILLER: I’m sorry?

EVANS: People without souls, inhuman people?

MILLER: Well, you could say this, but the actual direct reference is to your defendant’s own eyes, which as they appear in this image do look very black to me. I think that what he had done, with respect to Deanna Havas was completely without compassion. It was extremely vindictive. As I say in the previous, the previous page. Malicious, vindictive, slanderous and misogynistic against an independent young woman. I thought that was a soulless thing that he had done. Still, I must actually believe that Luke Turner does have a soul because I do believe that we do all have souls. I think that in this moment he somehow forgot that fact.

EVANS: If we go over to 891, but the time of this one looks as if it is within a matter of hours or less of the one we have just looked at. Again, it is from you, isn’t it, and it is directed at Mr Turner?

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: You say, “I’ve had enough of your disgusting behaviour and lies. I challenge you to a physical fight to take place in London one month from now.”

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: “Are you man enough to accept?”

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: Now, he hadn’t tweeted you in the meanwhile, had he, so this wasn’t a response to anything he said?

MILLER: No, this is a response to his campaign against Deanna Havas, it is not a response to anything he is saying about me, it is a response to what he is saying about Deanna Havas. As I have explained, I thought that his activity towards Deanna Havas was outrageous actually. Now, this tweet is essentially a challenge to a duel, it is actually a facetious challenge and, to be frank, somewhat absurd. You know, it could have been quite an amusing event actually, we could have had a boxing match, for example, we could have buried all of this and this all would have ended in August 2018. That would have been a better ending, I think, to this story.

EVANS: What, if you had had a duel?

MILLER: Yes, like, you know, Luke Turner and myself are both artists, in some form, why could we not have actually settled in matter rather than just allowing it to spiral endlessly in virtual space which is in the end what did happen with extremely disruptive consequences.

EVANS: You mention London in that tweet, so did you know at that point that he lived in London?

MILLER: It says on his profile page he lives in London.

EVANS: Did you know that then at that time?

MILLER: It says on his profile he is based in London.

EVANS: So you knew it?

MILLER: Yes.

EVANS: So, you seem to accept that this tweet could have been received and regarded as bullying, intimidating?

MILLER: No, I don’t accept.

EVANS: You are offering to have a fight with someone?

MILLER: It is a challenge to a fight, it is not a threat, it is an offer which he has a choice of whether he wishes to accept or not, in the end he didn’t reply to that a tweet either and I accepted that.

EVANS: I should say that this is, this along with all the other tweets that we have looked at this morning, over the blood in total, are ones which you don’t address in your witness statement. So, this is not evidence that you have given in this case so far. Can we go on to 892, the same day, but this time by the look of it in the evening at 11.30, nearly 11.30. So there are a lot of tweets coming out from you aimed at Mr Turner just on this one day and this one says, “I suppose it is not surprising that this invertebrate homunculus, who’s already shown he has no manly virtues, would refuse the challenge of a duel.” So, you are remarking, are you, on the fact that you have given him some time to respond to you to say, yes, please, I’d like a duel?

MILLER: Yes, I am saying he has refused the duel. Obviously, he prefers to instigate mobs to attack people, to attack a young woman in particular who has offended him by laughing at this image, I thought that was a cowardly act by the defendant.

EVANS: You accept that he would have received this because obviously you have responded to his, to your previous message or you have re-tweeted your allege below.

MILLER: Well, as I say, the previous message does directly tag him, I don’t know in fact whether he would have received it or not, at this moment actually I was also wondering whether he had muted me because he wasn’t responding or acknowledging anything I was saying since July, since July 30th, actually.

EVANS: Can we, could you take up, please, bundle 7. It is tab 348.

MILLER: I’m sorry, 348?

EVANS: Tab 348, page 5480?

MILLER: Uh-huh.

EVANS: Now, this is a definition of the word that you used in that tweet, ‘homunculus”?

MILLER: This is not a definition, this seems to be a painting with, or a postcard it says, which features the word homunculus. But the word homunculus simply means little man. Now, what the defendant appears to have done is search in Google ‘homunculus anti-Semite’, or something like this and come up with this image. Now, he produces this image and he says, ah, yes, this means that this is anti-Semitic. But the problem is that you can find almost anything if you operate Google in this manner.

EVANS: I am putting to you, you didn’t actually let me ask the question, that the definition of homunculus that a Jewish person would understand, is in relation to Jews in exodus from, in this case Germany or Austria as it became, and it is anti-Semitic?

MILLER: This is a completely preposterous statement. I have never encountered before the defendant began to claim this association with Jews and the word homunculus.

EVANS: The other word that you used here, that added to it was “invertebrate”, and I suggest that that was carefully chosen as well to correspond to reptile or some other snake, also a well-known anti-Semitic trope; do you agree?

MILLER: No, I do not agree. The word invertebrate simply means spineless, it refers to the cowardice of the defendant. It doesn’t refer to his Jewishness, nothing that I said to the defendant refers in any way to the fact that he is from a Jewish background. Nor do I believe, nor have I ever believed that any of his actions are related to this point. The defendant seeks to defend himself by claiming that all criticism directed against him, for whatever reason, is directed against him because he is Jewish, this is simply not the case. I am criticising the defendant, I admit intemperately, because of his actions towards Deanna Havas, because of his dishonest statements with respect to her, with respect to LD-50, this is why I am criticising the defendant. I myself am Jewish, I have obviously no animosity towards any other Jewish person, including the defendant, simply because they are Jewish. I was angry with the defendant because of his actions and I said that very clearly also in all of my statements.

***

I’m pretty sure that when Brit lawyers say things like “I put it to you…” and “I suggest…” that they are trying to suggest something to judges and juries and not witnesses to whom they pretend to “put it.” In a well-run American court (an exceptionally rare thing), this kind of “suggestion” would fly about as far as a lead balloon. I’ve fantasized about the witnesses—in one of those crime/legal dramas to which I am addicted—coming back with, “You suggesting something doesn’t make it true, but it allows you to try an implant something beyond the evidence in the minds of the jury and judge.”

They wear dusty old wigs, too, these people.

Here is an interview of Deanna Havis, who’s not a fascist, with Justin Murphy (also maligned by Turner as a fascist—which he categorically is not, not even close) for anyone who’d like to get a feel for who she actually is. Her first sin in 2016 was stating that she couldn’t in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton (a sentiment I completely understand—Clinton is an execrable character who essentially handed power to Donald Trump). That was when, as Havis describes it, she became “patient zero for his insanity.” (She called his partner-in-the-crusade, Shia LaBeouf, a “damaged child actor.”) Turner, in his post-court attack, shows a picture of Murphy and Power, suggesting they are aligned with some obscure Turkish version fascism, as evidenced by a secret hand signal—which Power associated with rock and roll, having never heard of said Turkish cult.

You really cannot make this shit up.

The “offensive” tweets from Havis, strip-mined by Turner, were a snarky reaction to the attacks—she was doing a fuck-you drag performance of the very “fascist” she (also Jewish, by the way) had been accused of being by the deranged Turner-LaBeouf posse. Contest would have shown they were in jest, bad taste or not, but Turner wasn’t seeking context. He was seeking ammunition.

What incensed Miller (and others) was that Turner—a rich, forty-something man—made it his bullying mission to destroy a struggling twenty-something female artist, who was already medicated for depression, as a way of making himself feel bold and virtuous—a kind of vampire nourishing himself on the blood of a young woman.

Miller and Power referred to this pathology more than once, Power saying simply at the end of one insane exchange, “Get help.” Unfortunately, this kind of shit is catnip to virtue-signalling, in-group, internet mobs. By the time you finish hearing Havis’s interview, you’ll want to fight Turner yourself. The fucker had the temerity to call others bullies.

Oh, but what about Groyper? they’ll say—the online site where Miller and Power posted “fascist” content. (You can see all this in the links. You can read Power’s response.)

Well, as to the Groyper business, it is fairly obvious to anyone who actually read all of it, instead of just Turner’s highlighted parts, and in the greater context of what was going on, would realize something that I can only express using an extremely arcane sociological term. Miller and Power were—you may need your dictionary here—fuckin’ around.

I remember back not long after the Norman Conquest, when a friend of mine from the Carolina Socialist Forum and I were walking back from a little demonstration that had been attended by a comic outfit called Lesbian Avengers. They even had hilarious t-shirts with round black bombs, fuses alight, and the motto: We Recruit! “I think I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body,” I said (it was funny back before people took such moronic claims seriously). “Fucking fag,” he replied. We weren’t homophobes, but we played them on TV. We were . . . fuckin’ around.

I mean, what the hell, people!? If some malignant, obsessed asshole had been able to screenshot this (1996), I’d have been hauled off to a gender transition camp, and Will would have been denied his PhD in Black History and hounded for life by imperious little scolds like Luke Turner and Shia LeBeouf.

Like I said, the court case was an instance of liberal law meets the kind of shit it hasn’t anticipated as technology and its socio-psychological and cultural effects outrun the capacity of a failing Kantian experiment in governance to keep up.

The comment by my friend who wanted to join the tackle-pile asked, “What have trans people done to make neo-fascism appealing?” The question-begging fallacy (smuggling the conclusion into the premises) meets the unexamined context. But at least this points us to the “original sin” (which wasn’t part of the proceedings). The trans issue was at work here—it was the reason Nina Power first became a “legitimate target” for “progressives.”

The initial internet mobs who went after Power (and a long list of gender-critical feminists who are no more neo-fascists than Power is), almost pioneered the very-online tactic of harassing, doxxing, and destroying the reputation of anyone who dared to challenge the trans-humanist religion of gender ideology. This gender-crit = fascism bullshit has been around for several years now. The loaded question above is part of that groupthink, which provides the basis for the stone-the-leper narrative that allows these mobs to justify themselves and wallow in their self-righteousness while they fuck up people’s lives—because once one is an official enemy, all things are permitted. The Palestinian becomes the Amalek.

I’m reading Dr. Power’s book right now. There’s much I agree with, some I disagree with, and plenty that’s making me stop and think through some old assumptions. That’s what public discourse is supposed to do; but it shuts down when every disagreement means virtual war. I’ll close now with a brief excerpt from her book—a book about men—and let readers judge whether or not she sounds like a “fascist.” Warning: it’s about suicide (and masculinity). This hits very close to home. With the author’s permission:

In his 1971 book on suicide, The Savage God, Al Alvarez describes the death of his friend Sylvia Plath with stark and piercing clarity. Plath invites Alvarez over on Christmas Eve 1962. He stays for a drink and critically discusses a line in one of her poems ‘The Nude/Verdigris of the condor’. Alvarez tries, obliquely, to take the edge off of Plath;s ‘private horrors’, but also avoids taking responsibilities that he doesn’t want and couldn’t, ‘in [his] own depression, have coped with’. When he leaves at around eight to go to a dinner party he understands that he has let her down ‘in some final and unforgivable way’. ‘And,’ Alvarez adds, ‘‘I knew she knew.’

Alvarez is describing the death of a woman whose life and work are now irreparably read through the lens of suicide. The suicide of someone you knew intensely and joyfully for a blessed and now scarcely imaginable period of time, participating in a cascade of thoughts and investigations, is, in every way, unbearable. Suicide never ends, it just gets folded like a pebble into the hem of days; it is a heavy fact, each recall, voluntary and involuntary, a drop into the deep stitching, the fabric of hours. We might be able, in some more elevated moments, to summon memories, to speak to the dead, to imagine what they might say, to find them in rare crossings in the ether; more often we feel their sadness, try to imagine their motives, feel our own sense of loss, our own remorse. It is true that no one dies until the last person who remembers them is also dead, yet the death of someone you loved weights like a flat stone, it is heavy, it is one-way.

As noted earlier, in the United Kingdom suicide is the biggest killer of men under forty-five, and 75 percent of suicides are male. In 2019, 4,903 men took their own lives. It is impossible to talk about men and masculinity today without consideration of this fact. It is important at the same time to note that to discuss male suicide is not to diminish the anguish and pain of women who suffer in this way.

Some have stressed the supposed inability of men to discuss their feelings, particularly those that touch upon questions of status, of inner misery, and of doubts and anxieties that may be felt to be laughable in the clear light of day. Yet male suicide perhaps may be felt differently in some ways. First among these is the question of what it means to feel so alone, as a man, against and not in this world. How to understand this peculiarly isolated mode of being? This is Mark Fisher, the writer and my friend who took his own life in 2017, described half-jokingly, as ‘the solitary urinal of male subjectivity.’

This highly sensitive reflection goes on for several more pages, but—in the manner of a Brit barrister—“I submit to you that” this is not the mindset of a fascist. These are not the thoughts of a Nazi, but of a smart and fundamentally decent person trying to think through the tribulations of a world that’s losing the thread.