A new study claims that 88 per cent of LGBT+ gamers who are out to their gaming communities receive some form of harassment while playing online.
The study, from gaming website OnlineRoulette.org, surveyed LGBT+ gamers to examine how inclusive the gaming industry is for the LGBT+ community.×ADVERTISING
Out LGBT+ gamers are 21 per cent more likely to receive harassment than those who have not disclosed their sexuality, with 73 per cent of LGBT+ gamers receiving harassment specifically based on their sexuality. That rises to 83 per cent for lesbian gamers, who are harassed more frequently.
It’s no surprise then that 41 per cent of LGBT+ players will avoid certain games and toxic communities due to the harassment they receive.
That’s not to say there aren’t supportive communities for LGBT+ players, however. Almost one in every two gamers surveyed said that Animal Crossinghas the most supportive gaming community. Call of Duty was ranked second (27 per cent) and Minecraft third (26 per cent).
What’s more, 45 per cent of LGBT+ players said they discovered their sexuality through playing games, showing how important games themselves and supportive communities can be. In fact, 71 per cent said that online communities were more supportive of their sexuality than IRL communities.
Representation is also important to the LGBT+ community, with 81 per cent of LGBT+ gamers saying they were more likely to purchase a game with a queer storyline.
It’s a sadder story in e-sports, however, where LGBT+ professionals earn considerably less than their straight counterparts. The top all-time LGBT+ earner is SonicFox ($676,770), but by comparison the top earning straight e-sports players of 2020 have lifetime earnings over $1million (James “Clayster” Eubanks and Ian “Crimsix” Porter).
While the study may not be surprising to LGBT+ gamers, it certainly reinforces not only how toxic gaming communities can be, but also how vital encouraging and supportive communities are to LGBT+ gamers discovering their identity.
A Colorado judge will allow a discrimination complaint against Christian baker Jack Phillips, who refused to make a cake in the colours of the trans Pride flag, but has thrown out a second complaint against him.
After Phillips refused to bake the cake, Scardina filed a complaint against him in 2018 through the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Scardini alleged that Philipps’ refused to create the cake because she is trans.
Phillips then sued the state of Colorado, claiming that he was being persecuted for his religious beliefs as he is Christian. Phillips and the state of Colorado agreed to drop the cases against each other in March 2019.
However, Scardini filed her own lawsuit against Philipps in June 2019, claiming his bakery falsely advertised that it would “be happy to provide a variety of baked goods, including birthday cakes, to all members of the public, including LGBT individuals”.
Scardina’s suit claimed that Phillips violated two state laws, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) and the Colorado Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) when refusing to create the cake.
Phillips’ attorneys filed a motion asking the court to dismiss Scardina’s case, arguing that she should have gone to the appeals court for a second course of action instead of opening a new tab at the trial court level.
But, in a ruling released on Thursday (4 March), Denver district court judge A Bruce Jones dropped the complaint against Phillips that alleged he had violated CAPA by engaging in “an unfair or deceptive trade practice”.
Scardina’s legal team argued, in response to the controversy, Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop “attempted to exploit the news coverage by stating they would sell birthday cakes to LGBT customers”.
But the judge said: “If [they] were engaged in such a stealth advertising campaign, they successfully disguised it within their speech on a matter of public concern.”
As such, the judgment said Scardina’s legal team “failed to establish an actionable unfair or deceptive trade practice” and found in Phillips’ favour on the CCPA claim.
But Jones did not dismiss the second claim which accuses Phillips of violating anti-discrimination law. The judgment said Scardina “need not establish that her transgender status was the ‘sole’ cause of the denial of services”. “Rather, she need only show that the discriminatory action was based, in whole or in part, on her protected status,” the court document read.
Scardina’s attorneys Paula Griesen said the judge’s decision to dismiss the claim was “a very narrow holding on a certain set of facts related to the Colorado Consumer Protection Act that has no bearing on the discrimination claim”.
“It has nothing to do with the merits of whether or not businesses are allowed to refuse service to the LGBTQ+ community,” Griesen added.
Alliance Defending Freedom general counsel Kristen Waggoner, who represented Phillips, said the decision to dismiss one of the claims against her client is “the first step towards final justice”.
“Jack has been threatened with financial ruin simply because he makes decisions about which messages to create and celebrate — decisions that every other artist in Colorado is free to make,” Waggoner said in a statement. “Tolerance for different opinions is essential. We look forward to defending Jack — and ultimately prevailing — on the remaining claim.”
President Joe Biden has announced two new orders to promote gender equality at the federal level with a new White House Gender Policy Council.
The executive orders are set to be signed by Biden Monday (8 March) to mark International Women’s Day.
The official White House statement said: “The White House Gender Policy Council will be an essential part of the Biden-Harris administration’s plan to ensure we build a more equal and just society – by aggressively protecting the rights and unique needs of those who experience multiple forms of discrimination, including individuals who are Black, Latina, Native, Asian American and Pacific Islander, people with disabilities, and LGBTQI+.”
The statement also highlighted how the COVID-19 pandemic “has exacerbated barriers that have held back women, especially women of colour”.
The first order is focused on advancing gender equity and equal opportunities for women and girls. The second is focused on reviewing the Department of Education’s policies to “guarantee education free from sexual violence”.
The executive order establishing the council will require its co-chairs to submit a strategy to address gender policies, programs and budgets across the government. The council will also employ two staff roles specifically focused on preventing and responding to gender-based violence.
The order states it is “intended to advance gender equity and equality, with sensitivity to the experiences of those who suffer discrimination based on multiple factors, including membership in an underserved community.”
The second executive order is specifically focused on “guaranteeing an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation or gender identity.”
It highlights “the significant rates at which students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) are subject to sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence”. It also specifically notes other intersectional discrimination including “on the basis of race, disability and national origin”.
This order calls on the Education Department to re-evaluate the controversial Title IX regulation which offers protections to those accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault on campus. This was implemented under former education secretary Betsy DeVos during the Trump administration.
The move comes shortly after Biden called for the Equality Act to be passed quickly in congress to prohibit discrimination against LGBT+ people in housing, employment and education, among other areas.
Biden has also recently hired a senior advisor for LGBT+ issues to help aid the administration in its commitment to inclusion, alongside an associate director of public engagement who will also advise on LGBT+ issues.
You may have heard of Abby and Brittany Hensel before, either on Oprah, in Time…
In his victory speech after the 2020 presidential election, Biden promised: “Young, old, urban, suburban, rural, gay, straight, transgender, white, Latino, Asian, Native American… You always had my back and I’ll have yours.”
President Joe Biden has come through with his promise to promote inclusion by appointing Reggie Greer as a senior advisor on LGBT+ issues.
Greer previously served as the director of constituent engagement at the Victor Institute before joining the Biden presidential campaign in March 2020. He helped build Biden’s LGBT+ elected officials network and the administration’s candidate training, which encourages LGBT+ people to run for office.
In his new role as director of priority placement and senior advisor on LGBTQ issues, Greer will help bring forward Biden’s vision to create the most LGBT+ inclusive administration in history. As such, Greer will act as the “bridge” between the LGBT+ community and the Biden administration.
He will be joined by Hannah Bristol, who was appointed as an associate director of public engagement, in advising on LGBT+ issues as well as youth and progressive issues.
Mayor Annise Parker, president and CEO of the Victory Institute, said Greer is a “ray of sunshine in the conflict-driven world of politics and the respect and trust he’s earned from LGBTQ leaders will make him an extremely effective advisor”.
“He exemplifies the America United ethos, with a rare ability to bring diverse communities and interests together and rally them behind a common cause and vision,” Parker said. “He will be invaluable as a bridge between the administration and the millions of LGBTQ Americans relying on president Biden to bring needed change to our nation.”
‘Biden will fight for queer people with disabilities like me’
In a column for Out magazine, Greer promised that Biden would fight to restore the “soul of the nation” by bringing forward more inclusive policies, especially by fighting for LGBT+ rights “here at home and abroad”.
He also said Biden would “fight the epidemic of violence against transgenderpeople, tackle the effects of climate change, address systemic racism and injustice and rebuild an economy that works for everyone”.
Greer shared how his life as a disabled, gay man had shaped his career. He grew up with hemifacial microsomia, a degenerative birth defect that affects one out of every 10,000 births, which he said “was not easy, but I learned early on to make this journey my own”.
He also remembered “how impactful it had been for me” to come out to his parents. Greer said he was able to “lean into my truth and embrace all of the qualities that make up who I am”.
He explained Biden is a “president of the light” who is “explicitly drawing upon our collective desire for a just and inclusive society — a society where we embrace cultural differences and policies that are equitable”.
A Buncombe County commissioner who gained national prominence in the campaign to fully legalize same-sex marriage has said she will seek the congressional seat held by far-right Republican Madison Cawthorn.
The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara of Asheville announced her run March 3 for the 11th District seat, taking an immediate shot at Cawthorn and his Washington speech to supporters of former president Donald Trump directly before the Capitol storming.
“Some people will say a gay woman who’s a Christian minister just can’t get elected in the South. Not to mention, she’s a Democrat. When I say an insurrectionist who flirts with Nazis, fires up a violent crowd to attack our democracy, well he shouldn’t get reelected anywhere,” she said in a campaign video released with the announcement.
Pippa Sterk, an ambassador for British LGBT+ charity Just Like Us, writes for PinkNews about how lesbians in particular have grappled with loneliness amid lockdown.
I want to shed light on the mental health crisis among young lesbians, but as I sit down to write this, I realise: how can I adequately capture the loss I’ve felt over the past year?ADVERTISING
How can I write about something that is still continuing to impact us, despite the vaccine-shaped light at the end of the tunnel?
Let’s begin with the facts. New statistics show LGBT+ young people are twice as likely to feel lonely and more than twice as likely to worry for their mental health on a daily basis during the pandemic than their non-LGBT+ peers.
The figures show that the lockdown has had a profoundly negative effect on the mental health of young lesbians. Four in five lesbians (78 per cent) of us have seen our mental health get worse through lockdown, compared to 68 per cent of LGBT+ young people generally, and 49 per cent of non-LGBT+ young people.
Almost nine in 10 (87 per cent) young lesbians have felt lonely and separated from the people they’re closest to during the pandemic, including six in 10 (60 per cent) who have felt this daily.
This is compared to 46 per cent of gay boys, 54 per cent of young bisexualpeople and 52 per cent of young transgender people who have felt lonely and separated on a daily basis.
As the numbers show, the loneliness of lockdown has impacted young LGBT+ people disproportionately, and young lesbians in particular.
Being stuck in a house with anyone can be difficult, no matter how well you get along.
For LGBT+ young people, however, being away from school could mean that they are forced to spend more time in an environment that does not accept them – and that’s hoping the school is accepting, which isn’t always the case.
The pandemic has urged us all to ‘stay at home’, but for many of us young LGBT+ people this is at the cost of our mental health.
Even if our families accept us, there might not be anyone in the household who actually shares the experience of being LGBT+.
Delaying care can be as serious a threat to your health as coronavirus. See how Sutter…
LGBT+ safe havens have generally relied on the availability of public spaces, exactly because we often need to go out to find other LGBT+ people.
However, a lot of the spaces that used to host LGBT+ meet-ups (museums, libraries, community centres) have now had to close.
For lesbians this has a particular impact, as even pre-lockdown, it was difficult to carve out our own spaces. If LGBT+ spaces are scarce, finding spaces that cater specifically to lesbians is like finding gold dust.
This is even further compounded for lesbians who have multiple marginalised identities – lesbians of colour, like me, might not feel welcome in all-white lesbian spaces. Trans lesbians might feel like a mostly cisgender lesbian space is not for them.
Even within fiction, it is difficult to find depictions of lesbian community and lesbian joy that feel authentic. Many TV series and films about lesbians are not actually created by lesbians, leading to an uncomfortable reliance on stereotypes and clichés.
When we are only ever shown that our lives will be difficult, it turns this depiction into a self-fulfilling prophecy: at the very least, we have to be able to imagine our happiness, if we want to be able to live it.
I am one of the lucky ones. I get along with the people I live with, and I feel safe expressing my lesbian identity with them. I still have an income, which means I still have a roof over my head. Nobody close to me has died of the virus.
Even writing those sentences felt scary, because it sounds like tempting fate, like I’m jinxing the little bit of structure in my life. I am not a superstitious person, but when a situation is so incredibly out of your control, it is necessary to find those last few things that you can control, and guard them as closely as possible.
One thing that I’ve held onto are my online LGBT+ communities. I am part of an LGBT+ community choir, as well as an LGBT+ student organisation, and my friends in those spaces have been a bigger support than I could ever say.
A particular organisation that has helped me find purpose in the pandemic is Just Like Us, a charity working to improve the lives of young LGBT+ people in schools. They also conducted the research that the statistics above were taken from.
A few months into the pandemic, I joined Just Like Us in September 2020. I was itching to find a way to help other people during lockdown and remain in touch with my community, so volunteering for an LGBT+ charity felt like the natural thing to do.
In the ambassador programme, young people (age 18-25) are trained to deliver talks in school on what it is like to grow up as an LGBT+ person, and what young people can do to support each other and make each other’s lives easier.
I finished my training in January, and I am set to deliver my first virtual group workshop this week.
With virtual school talks, Just Like Us can hopefully help ease this mental health crisis for all LGBT+ young people who will finally get to see and hear from someone like them. While it may be difficult to be a young LGBT+ person right now, we can show that there is a community out there that is ready and willing to help each other through tough times.
Young LGBT+ people can and should be dared to imagine that their future will be bright and that there will always be people who walk beside them on their journey.
Sonoma County LGBTQI Community Center efforts – 1972 to the present. We’ll be covering the Penngrove WomanCenter, River Queen Women’s Center, LEGACY/Pride Center – from 1972 to the present.
To register for the LGBTQI Timeline class please click on the appropriate link below. If you have not taken any classes through SRJC in the past year, you are considered a New Student.
This time our villainess has dispensed with The Cool Girl and has picked up a different stereotype of femininity — The Carer. Men can’t see through her nurturing exterior. She’s a sociopath, but in a professional, polished package, so you’d never expect it.
Marla Grayson acts as a legal guardian to seniors, making financial and medical decisions for those whose family’s can’t help. But Marla is actually scamming these wards of the state, putting them in expensive care homes, flipping their houses and selling their estates, alongside Fran, her investigator/analyst/fixer girlfriend.
So this is a comedy?
When the set up is as tasteless as a dead baby joke, as J Blakeson’s film is, some people are just not going to want to stick around for the punchline. That’s how I felt anyway, trying to sit still for a story where the protagonist is a grifting, exploitative elder abuser. Am I too sensitive? Because I feel like senior abuse in our extremely broken health care system is too real to be humorous.
It wasn’t until a third of the way through a disturbingly sociopathic film, whose attempts at irony or satire fell just short of actually forcing a smile or a laugh, that the film’s humor finally broke through.
Peter Dinklage shows up playing a mysterious mob boss, a little bit unhinged and universally threatening if things don’t go according to his plan. His incompetent henchmen provide a bit of madcap comic relief. Chris Messina enters as a verbose and eloquent Saul Goodman-type, but out of a Coen Brothers script. OK, you’ve worn me down, Blakeson. I will ride with your dead-baby-joke-level script.
With time, the unlikeable and repulsive Marla becomes more watchable. It helps that the chemistry between Marla and her blisteringly hot business partner and girlfriend Fran is believable.
Like Gone Girl, I Care a Lot is preoccupied with gender roles and sexual politics. The hyper-feminine carer/nurturer at the center of I Care a Lot begs the question: how can femininity effectively obscure violence, exploitation and ambition? Gender roles and stereotypes like docility, a caring nature, an instinct to nurture, which are forcibly put on women as a class, can actually be exploited for the power and profit of the individual woman. Male violence on full display in society creates a diversion that allows the female sociopath to lurk, stalk and loot in plain sight.
In I Care a Lot, Roman Lunyov’s weakness (loving his mom) would traditionally be coded as feminine. To protect her, he asserts a real burn-it-all-down type of masculine power: kidnapping, torture, (attempted) murder. Marla is his opposite. She loves nothing so much as power. She wants money even at the cost of love. Her counterattacks go through the courts, through the hospital system. She’s sly and flying under the radar as best as she can.
Marla’s insistence on moving forward with her plans for domination in the guardianship field, in spite of the promise of violence, is relatable to any woman who has resisted sexual grooming, intimidation, and even threats from chauvinists. That’s going to include a lot of straight women too, but lesbians, faced with ‘you just haven’t found the right man,’ or ‘you could really use a good d*ck to turn you straight,” are going to find some catharsis in Marla’s stubbornness and fearlessness.
I CARE A LOT (2021) Rosamund Pike as Marla. Cr: Seacia Pavao/NETFLIX
Some kind of Third Wave Feminism
As a lesbian, the central character, is also a symbol of the rejection of, even a resistance to, male power. Lesbianism is a boundary. It’s a hard stop, a wall. It centers women in a world where maleness and masculinity are the standard, the norm, the axis of power around which everything else is believed to orbit. And Marla is her own axis of power, refusing to bend to gangsters, administrators, or the law. She’s a product of third-wave feminism — a woman amassing power by any means, just as men do.
Comparisons to Gone Girl in my own review and in countless others that you’ll encounter this week is not fair to Rosamund Pike, who has in fact made more than one movie. Her range is not limited to blonde-bobbed sociopaths who break the fourth wall to offer their own armchair feminist philosophy. But you’re going to keep seeing those comparisons because Gone Girl is essentially a perfect psychological thriller and a deep read on gender roles and sexual politics, a combo that I Care a Lot is also aiming for.
That instant and unavoidable comparison creates one of the film’s biggest stumbling blocks.
Remember how, shortly after the smash hit A Quiet Place had audiences (specifically me) screaming with its combination of alien invasion/creature feature/plague horror, Netflix took all these elements and made their own (seemingly knock-off) alien/creature/plague apocalypse horror? Where in A Quiet Place, the creatures were triggered by sound, and deafness proved to be an advantage that saved the day and pointed to a brighter tomorrow, in Bird Box it was sight, and blindness was the key to a brighter tomorrow.
It almost seemed like Netflix had written, produced and cast the film by algorithm, swapping out successful elements of a blockbuster to create a data-driven small screen success. In fact, Bird Box was adapted from a novel, but its similarities to AQuiet Place, along with the timing and hype around its release, led to audiences feeling let down.
Well, I Care A Lot feels real algorithm-y. It brings to mind Rosamund Pike’s iconic turn as Amy Dunne, sure, but also Maniac (which was produced by algorithm) and Ryan Murphy’s recent Netflix vehicles, with their escalating camp and color blocking.
Amy Dunne was not a likeable villain. She was nasty, unstoppably evil, and her femininity was a super power that allowed her to pull off airtight crimes, just like our Marla.
Although she was unlikeable, it’s exciting to root for her and Nick in the end. He’s trash, she’s trash, they’re perfect for each other. In a sick way, these characters lose and win in equal measure in the battle for their marriage. The thriller twists into a very gothic romance, and who doesn’t want soul mates to stay together?
That sentiment, of rooting for evil to meet its match, is what’s missing from I Care a Lot. The ending pulls the remaining loose ends in the story together to try and tie them up, but it doesn’t work, or at least for me it didn’t, because the justice served is cheap and shallow. Lunyov doesn’t get a comeuppance on par with Marla’s and Fran’s. And unlike Nick and Amy Dunne’s ending, you can’t turn this one over and over in your mind for hours or days after it’s over, considering all the demented and disturbing outcomes for these characters.
After much resistance, J Blakeson’s film had finally worn me down. If I wasn’t rooting for the evil assholes, at least I wanted to find out what happens to them next. But in the end, caring a little was not rewarded by I Care a Lot.
Saturday, March 64:00–5:30 p.m.Online programFree | $5 suggested donation Award-winning young-adult author Malinda Lo will read selections from and discuss her new novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Dutton Books, 2021), a queer coming-of-age story set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. The story traces the blossoming of love between seventeen year-old Lily Hu and her friend Kathleen Miller in a Chinatown beset by Red-Scare paranoia and deportation threats. Lo will share details from her research into the midcentury LGBTQ community at the GLBT Historical Society’s archives, and discuss the novel and its historical inspirations with historian Amy Sueyoshi. Register online here.
Thursday, March 117:00–7:30 p.m.Online programFree | $5 suggested donation In this month’s installment of the Queer Culture Club, GLBT Historical Society Executive Director Terry Beswick will interview architectural history and historic preservation planning consultant Shayne Watson, the owner of Watson Heritage Consulting. Watson coauthored the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco(2016) and, with Beswick, was a cochair of the San Francisco LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Strategy (2020). Queer Culture Club is our monthly series each second Thursday that focuses on LGBTQ people who are defining the queer culture of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Each month, Beswick interviews queer culture-makers, including authors, playwrights, historians, activists, artists and archivists, to learn about their work, process, inspirations, hopes and dreams. Register online here.
Friday, March 196:00–7:30Online program$10 | No one turned away Legendary San Francisco gay “radical sex” photographer Mark I. Chester will present a live slideshow presentation and discuss his recently published book of contemporary photography, Street Sex Photos (2021). The book documents gay men’s sexual lives in the South of Market district of San Francisco in an era when the neighborhood was, in Chester’s words, “like a giant supermarket of the sexual underground.” The book also is an elegy to the changing social world of SoMa since the 1980s, as the darkened alleyways give rise to new development that threatens to extinguish what is left of a gay subculture that flourished for decades. The book is available for purchase in two sizes; contact the author directly by text at (415) 613-0939, or by email at sfphotou@yahoo.com. Register online here.
Friday, March 266:00–7:30 p.m.Online program$5 | Free for members To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of the GLBT Historical Society Museum and the 36th anniversary of the GLBT Historical Society’s foundation, we are hosting a virtual LGBTQ history trivia evening! Participants will mix and mingle with other queer history buffs and show off their knowledge of our vast queer past. The top-scoring teams will win fabulous prizes, including a private museum tour, complimentary memberships and limited-edition merchandise. All ticket sales go directly to supporting our archives, museum and public-history programs, furthering the society’s mission to preserve and share LGBTQ history. A good time for all is guaranteed! Register online here.
Friday, April 26:00–7:30 p.m.Online programFree | $5 suggested donation For a half-century, the Bay Area Reporter (BAR) has provided coverage of San Francisco and the Bay Area’s LGBTQ community. In this special discussion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication that has become the community’s newspaper of record, a group of activists, writers and culture-makers will recount their relationship to and history of the BAR. The panel will be moderated by Terry Beswick, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, and panelists include Gwen Smith, “Transmission” columnist for the BAR; Hank Plante, an award-winning, veteran Bay Area journalist; Paul Henderson, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability (SFDPA); Marga Gomez, an award-winning Latinx performer and comic; Sharon McNight, a Tony-nominated singer and performer; and Michael Yamashita, the BAR’s publisher. Register online here.
Ferris State University professor Thomas Brennan was fired after tweeting about “fags” and dismissing COVID-19 as a “hoax”.
Brennan, a former assistant physical science professor at the Ferris State University in Michigan, was previously placed on leave in November last year for a slew of homophobic, racist and antisemitic social media posts.
He often tweeted about the “Jewish mafia”, called the coronavirus pandemic a “Jewish revolution” and used the N-word in reference to Black physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, according to an exposé by the university’s newspaper The Torch.
As much as Brennan sought to shrug off the article as a “hit piece” at a time, he confirmed on Twitter Saturday (27 February) that he has now been dismissed from the university.
The school confirmed to The Detroit Newsthat it had terminated his contract Thursday (25 February).
“Ferris State University Assistant Professor of Physical Sciences Thomas Brennan’s employment at the university has been terminated, effective Thursday, 25 February 2021,” a spokesperson said.
“The university has no further comment.”
Ferris State professor Thomas Brennan blames homophobic tweets on ‘electromagnetic fields’
In a lengthy, six-page statement on his personal website, Brennan said he tweeted what he did because of, among other things, electromagnetic fields.
“My defence is that I was acting out and speaking out of despair caused by a personal crisis involving extremely painful migraines, EMF sensitivity and a series of repeated break-ins into my home,” he wrote.
“I am one of thousands of Americans from all walks of life who claim to be victims of a secret programme that harasses people, breaks into their homes, and uses [electromagnetic frequency] along with bio, neuro, or nano-technologies to poison and torture their targets,” the statement continued.
“Rather than kill the target, the goal is to get the target to have a breakdown that discredits them and causes them to lose their livelihood.”
He went on to detail various points of contention between himself and faculty leaders, such as refusing to wear a mask on the grounds that a mandate would be “immoral” and claiming that the severity of the coronavirus has been “exaggerated by revolutionary leftists in the media and government”.
He also admitted to the “red zingers” he posted to his Twitter and described his account on the platform as a “little hole to shout in and purge my despair”.
“As I said, it was despair that led me to do this, and I knew I might get in trouble but I needed to cry out,” he said.
“Since I had no way to speak about my disability at work,” Brennan added, “I was exercising my free speech rights on Twitter as a result of my disability.
“Therefore the things I said on Twitter were not expressed in order to discriminate against people of different races or social categories but were uttered as a result of my disability. This is one of many reasons why freedom of speech exists.”
