[Updated] An Open Letter About Bullying To Sandy Garossino

Update: Sandy Garossino sent out the above tweet this morning. It’s about a radio host potentially losing his job as a result of asking British Columbia’s premier if she’s a ‘MILF’. The few people I’ve shared this with all believe this is rather hypocritical of Sandy considering she’s been continually bashing me ever since I wrote this letter to her.

Sandy, why hasn’t my apology ‘done the trick’ for you? Could this be because you’re trying to deflect from your bad behaviour that prompted me to write about you? If you believe you are worthy of political power in this country, you can’t behave this way. I’d like an apology please- and I know at least a few others who are also waiting…

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Sandy,

First, my apologies for my poor use of metaphor when describing your relationship with Warren Buffett and TIDES Canada. It was a failed attempt to write satire, and a lesson learned. I will do my best to avoid expressions like that in the future.

The point I was trying to make was that you’ve spent a lot of time promoting American foundations and billionaires lately. More accurately, it appears to many people that you’ve engaged in a campaign of bullying attacks on people who criticise them. Having been the victim of group bullying- I find this very disturbing.

The first time you came to my attention was after I noticed a Twitter conversation you were having about the TIDES Foundation’s links to violent anarchists. Without knowing the whole story you attacked a woman and publicly denounced her credibility. When I later explained to you about TIDES funding the Ruckus Society, and Ruckus’ participation in the violence at the Battle of Seattle you went silent. I believe the person you attacked is still waiting for an apology.

Next, I saw your hit piece on Vivian Krause in the Vancouver Observer- a publication run by the sister of Vice-Chair of TIDES Canada. The attacks you made on Krause were vitriol, and deeply personal. It’s okay to criticise people’s ideas & actions, but your comments about Krause’s age, appearance, and employment status crossed a serious line.

Your attacks on Krause continued in another article you had published in the Huffington post. This time, thankfully, you didn’t make comments about age and appearance- but it still came across like high school bullying. You twisted Krause’s words to change their meaning and tried to use that to ridicule her.

I wrote my story about the Rockefeller Foundation funding a German eugenics institute as an example to counter your ‘nothing to be seen here’ narrative about foreign foundations. History has shown us different- Rockefeller’s connection with Josef Mengele shows us that. There is, indeed, ‘something to be seen here’- it’s imperative we examine their motivations.

Today you set-off on another set of attacks on Krause. I noticed this because I started getting scores of hits to one of my articles- someone posted it to Twitter to counter your online assault. Rather than approaching any of the content of the article, you jumped into your pattern of deflection by attacking the messenger. You twisted my poorly chosen metaphor into saying I accused you of “offering sexual favours” and you told people that I compared you “to Mengele”.

When you made these trumped-up accusations against me today, what you did was a form of bullying. You furthered this bullying by trying to reflect the damage of your accusations onto Krause. The high point of today’s bullying was when you tried to shame people into not associating with me- this is a very old and well known tactic (and is favoured by the TIDES funded Ruckus Society).

I learned today that you have partnered with Raffi Cavoukian in an initiative to tackle problems with teenagers and social media bullying. I commend you for this effort, it’s a very worthy and important cause. As a first step in this process, can I recommend that you begin by “being the change you want to see”?

Or, the change these kids want to see?

You’re a prominent public figure, a politician, business woman, and you’re now partners with Raffi- think of the kids!. As a role-model for young people you are trying to protect, and as a self-declared protector, you have a responsibility to change your current pattern of behaviour. Stop with the personal attacks about looks and age, stop making stuff up, focus on the facts of the debate, and lead by example.

The world will be better for it- I promise…