Freedom of Expression, Extremist Reactions, and Institutional Cowardice

Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney based in New York and Connecticut. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in National and Intercultural Studies and Middle East Studies from Fordham University in 2006, followed by a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She operates a boutique national security law practice. She serves as President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory firm. Additionally, she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider, which focuses on foreign policy, geopolitics, security, and human rights. She is actively involved in several professional organizations, including the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, where she serves as Written Content Vice Chair of the Science and Technology Committee. She is also a member of the New York City Bar Association and has served on its Middle Eastern and North African Affairs and Foreign and Comparative Law Committees.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Irina Tsukerman examine freedom of expression, moral responsibility, online harassment, extremism, manipulation, and institutional cowardice. They distinguish accountability for one’s words from responsibility for another person’s violent or abusive actions. Drawing on hostile correspondence, professional disputes, NXIVM, Keith Raniere, contested IQ claims, family experience, and redemption, they explore how intimidation, ambition, weak institutions, and fear can enable destructive individuals while discouraging principled dissent and independent judgment in public and professional life.

Threats, Speech, and Moral Agency

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I am certain that you receive a great deal of unusual correspondence outside your principal email account. You are probably like me and maintain several email addresses, including accounts for different organizations. Numerous accounts for different organizations. Some are simply old addresses to which people continue sending material, so I have to keep checking them.

I may have mentioned an email I received around the time of my trip to Ukraine. I jokingly refer to it as fan mail. It stated, “Your writing sucks, and I hope you die soon.” I took it seriously because I was preparing to enter Ukraine.

This year alone, I have been accused of being a Ukrainian spy, a Russian spy, a Chinese spy, an American spy, a homosexual Freemason, and a paid shill for the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccination movement. Another person described one of my books as American imperialist. Yet, quite literally, not metaphorically or by exaggeration, that person had never read the book. The accusation was therefore presumptuous, inaccurate, and poorly reasoned. Each accusation arose in response to a different piece of work.

The accusation that I was a homosexual Freemason, for example, came in response to the anthology concerning abuse perpetrated by Orthodox clergy. These accusations appeared in various commentaries.

Another interesting response came from an individual who seemed somewhat detached from the substance of the work. The person expressed concern about my critiques of religion but did not cite any specific examples, which would have been the reasonable thing to do. I usually ask for examples because, across millions of published words, it is difficult to respond meaningfully to a general accusation.

The person cited the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the September 11 attacks as examples of religious extremism. Both examples involved Islamist extremism. That appeared to be a biased omission of other forms of religious extremism, although I do not think the person was fully conscious of the bias as they were Christian. The email seemed to express genuine concern.

The person’s argument was not merely that I should be responsible for what I say. Freedom of expression does not place speech above all other human considerations, and that would not be a fair characterization of my position.

The unusual part was that the person cited extreme acts of terrorism and expressed fear about what religious extremists might do at some indefinite point in the future. Given the examples of Charlie Hebdo and September 11, the concern involved extraordinarily violent responses to words and ideas. The person also invoked the protection of children, because of course.

Extremism, Agency, and Responsibility

Tsukerman: My response would be that, as a religious person, why would she deny agency to the individuals and organizations committing violence? People are responsible for their own actions. They do not cease to be responsible because someone provoked them with uncomfortable speech. Almost any form of dissenting speech may make extremists uncomfortable.

Frankly, even if you sat silently in a chair and never wrote a word on any subject, some extremists might still wish to harm you simply because you were not one of them.

Jacobsen: I found the experience intellectually interesting. I read the message without reacting emotionally and tried to understand its logic. According to that logic, I was responsible not only for what I said, which is fair, but also, by extrapolation, for what religious people did and for what religious extremists might do. That is an extraordinary burden of responsibility to impose on a writer.

Everyone with whom I have discussed the matter, including friends with very different perspectives, has found the argument both amusing and unfair.

Another interesting aspect was that I would apparently be responsible for the actions of religious extremists only when those actions were negative. What if a religious extremist were somehow inspired to perform an admirable act or eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize? Would I receive credit for that as well?

The first person I interviewed who was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize was Dr. Hawa Abdi, who has since died. Her family has continued aspects of her humanitarian work in Somalia. Somalia is a deeply religious society. Suppose someone there read something I had written and was inspired to help survivors of domestic violence or to protect vulnerable members of the community. Should I receive credit for that action? Of course not, not even vicariously.

We do not ordinarily credit writers whenever someone reads an inspirational quotation on social media and later performs a good deed, perhaps between games of FarmVille and Solitaire.

Tsukerman: The argument, then, is that because an extremist might respond violently, we should avoid confronting any idea that could provoke that person.

The problem extends beyond religion. There are left-wing extremists, right-wing extremists, incels, cult members, and many other potentially violent groups. According to that reasoning, we should never criticize anyone with extreme beliefs who might respond violently. That would amount to accommodating people who are coercive, obsessively retaliatory, or violent.

Jacobsen: That is part of the problem. I agree completely.

The episode raised several ethical questions for me because it forced me to consider how some people genuinely understand responsibility. The central issue concerns freedom of expression, or freedom of speech in American terminology, and the distinction between responsibility for speech and responsibility for another person’s actions.

Speech can certainly cause harm, particularly within intimate social settings. A person can hurt someone who loves them, and what is said may have immediate consequences within a family, friendship, or relationship.

However, when evaluating a person’s moral character more generally, I place greater weight on what people do. Actions seem to provide the strongest test of someone’s implicit and explicit ethics because conduct is the eventual output of cognition, emotion, intention, and judgment. In action, those elements become aligned to some degree.

Retaliatory Harassment and the German Dispute

Tsukerman: The following account reflects my recollection and interpretation of the dispute. A related situation arose several years ago and remains partly unresolved. It involved a dispute between a journalist and a public official in Germany.

The journalist published an article alleging that a German official responsible for combating antisemitism was not only failing to perform his duties but was himself antisemitic and too dangerous to remain in that position.

I initially shared the article without knowing the full background. I later saw an exchange between the journalist and the official. Several people also contacted me and said that the journalist had a personal vendetta against the official, that the characterization was grossly unfair, and that the article was highly one-sided.

I then shared the official’s response and wrote, in effect, “I shared the journalist’s article, and now I am sharing the official’s response. Judge for yourselves.”

I did not expect that decision to trigger a prolonged conflict lasting several years. The journalist attacked me personally and accused me of enabling antisemites and of acting as an agent of Qatar and Iran while also being paid by Germany. He drew people I had met, organizations with which I had never had contact, and even the German Foreign Office into the dispute.

I understood his public threats as attempts to intimidate people I knew into supporting him, even when they were unfamiliar with the dispute. In my view, he effectively accused me of being a bad Jew merely for questioning his position.

I took the time to interview the German official and ask difficult questions about his views on several issues. I was satisfied with his responses and published the interview so that readers could evaluate the exchange for themselves. I did not rely solely on the official’s statements or on the claims of his supporters.

In my view, the journalist subsequently misrepresented my views and distorted the circumstances, including in communications involving officials at the United States Department of State and others.

According to my understanding of the proceedings, litigation in Germany resulted in an adverse ruling against him, although I believed he later characterized the result differently.

Jacobsen: It is quite the manoeuvre.

I have encountered surprisingly few unpleasant people in my professional life. Considering that I have conducted thousands of interviews, that is a fairly good record.

Sometimes the problem is not a complete absence of character but a combination of persistent suspicion and aggression that encourages destructive behaviour. Extending a dispute for years suggests a pattern beyond an ordinary professional disagreement.

I have dealt with perhaps one definite fraudster and scammer and called this out before anyone years ago. Some Christian media outlets and organizations embraced this person uncritically because he endorsed Christianity and was useful to the movement, with little apparent concern for fraudulent conduct or damage to other people’s lives. That's common. It was common in the clergy abuse cases and in the cases of the other crimes in Christian institutions. Many, definitely not all, Christians would rather attack the messenger of the truth than the individuals who perpetrated the crime and continue to do so. I issued appropriate warnings to other people, and investigative exposés have since been published about that individual, which are substantive and conclusive.

I have also dealt with another person who appears to want a form of personal worship but cannot quite achieve it. The effort is handled clumsily. Both individuals are reasonably intelligent but lack the social skills necessary to accomplish what they are attempting.

Manipulation, NXIVM, and Intellectual Mythology

The worst and most prominent among them is Keith Raniere in some of these areas. Raniere’s career provides an extreme illustration of what can happen when institutional prestige, intellectual mythology, and personal manipulation reinforce one another.

Someone from whom I was only one degree removed through the Mega Society was Keith Raniere. We have discussed the Mega Society briefly before, and the subject deserves further examination.

Raniere was evidently intelligent, although claims about the precise level of his intelligence should be treated cautiously. His academic and professional records do not demonstrate exceptional diligence or conscientiousness. Intelligence, educational achievement, and conscientiousness are related only imperfectly and should not be treated as interchangeable.

His score on the unsupervised Mega Test contributed to his public reputation for extraordinary intelligence. However, the Mega Test was not a conventionally standardized clinical intelligence test, and very high scores derived from it cannot be interpreted with the precision often claimed.

Raniere was also a highly effective manipulator. He was convicted of offences including racketeering, sex trafficking, attempted sex trafficking, forced-labour conspiracy, and wire-fraud conspiracy. He was sentenced in 2020 to 120 years in federal prison.

He was therefore not merely a fraudster or scammer but also an abuser whose organization exploited and trafficked women.

The HBO documentary series The Vow ran for two seasons and examined NXIVM, Raniere, Nancy Salzman, and other central figures in the organization. Salzman, a co-founder and former president of NXIVM, pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 42 months in prison.

Tsukerman: I have not watched the documentary, but I am familiar with the case and have spoken with people who knew aspects of the situation.

Jacobsen: I also wrote for many earlier issues of Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society, covering approximately eight or nine years or more, and have reviewed the entire series of the journal going back quite a bit.

According to material I reviewed from around 1989 or 1990, representatives associated with Guinness World Records explained why the category of “highest IQ” was discontinued. The fundamental problem was that available intelligence tests could not reliably distinguish among individuals at such extreme levels.

The title referred, at best, to the highest score produced by a particular test under particular conditions. It did not establish that the person possessed the highest intelligence in the world.

Such a title is psychometrically dubious and difficult to maintain. Cognitive performance can vary modestly across occasions and generally changes across the lifespan. Different tests also use different scales, norms, ceilings, and assumptions. A single purported world record therefore creates an appearance of precision that the evidence cannot support.

I have experienced only two seriously negative professional situations. If personal and professional mixed, I do not count those as negative, truly, as love was involved. Other gentler and private lessons are learned and gained from those. On the professional ones, in one of them, I bear some responsibility because I was still very early in my career.

Early in my career, I scheduled an interview with a moderately prominent British public figure and missed the meeting. I rescheduled it, chose the new time myself, and was then late. The person was unhappy, and that anger was justified. We eventually completed the interview.

The second difficult situation arose from what appeared to be an editorial misunderstanding, followed by an extraordinary amount of anger. It could have been resolved simply by declining to publish the piece and moving on.

Apart from those incidents, I have had very few genuinely unpleasant professional experiences. In your case, however, the conflict lasted for years. Based on my experience as an international interviewer, media professional, and independent publisher, that suggests the conduct extended beyond an ordinary professional dispute.

Most people in professional settings want to resolve disputes. They generally want to resolve them promptly and discreetly. When someone’s conduct prevents all three outcomes, resolution, timeliness, and discretion, something is wrong to a more significant degree.

Tsukerman: The person’s conduct was clearly persistent and destructive. I also suspected that he had a personal interest in obtaining the official’s position and was frustrated that he could not do so. Other information emerged later that suggested additional possible explanations.

What interested me most was his ability to intimidate people into adopting absurd positions merely to avoid becoming targets of his public retaliation campaigns and persistent online harassment.

Social-media platforms should have acted against that conduct. Organizations affiliated with him should also have investigated the reported conduct and considered whether his continued affiliation was appropriate. Instead, many continued to tolerate him in various capacities.

Consequences, Redemption, and Moral Repair

Jacobsen: That is very interesting. People inevitably make mistakes because life is long. Life can feel even longer when someone makes a prolonged series of destructive decisions.

I have probably discussed this with you before, but my father misused alcohol and was absent for most of my life. My parents divorced when I was very young. During the final decade of his life, we had to manage some of his affairs.

After he died, we discovered that he owed money to the Government of Canada and had not left a will. We had to work through the resulting paperwork and unresolved obligations. Some matters may never be fully settled.

People can make very poor decisions whose consequences continue for years. I speak from experience as someone who has had to live with the effects of another person’s choices.

Even so, I believe there should be room for what Christians might call redemption. People should have an opportunity to correct their course.

We previously worked on a text concerning antisemitism and the extreme forms it can take. Some people who once held deeply antisemitic beliefs have changed substantially. Former extremists can sometimes become effective critics of the movements they once supported because they understand how those communities think and organize.

When someone pursues a petty dispute for several years, however, that is different. This was not a noble cause. It was an extraordinarily trivial conflict.

I am sorry that you had to endure it.

Institutional Cowardice and the Price of Convenience

Tsukerman: The episode illustrates how people attempt to control the speech of others. This person tried to limit everyone else’s ability to speak and pressured people either to support him or to remain silent.

The original dispute barely deserved public attention, but people still had the right to examine the evidence and reach their own conclusions. He attempted to restrict whom others could engage with, associate with, or interview. He sought to make their lives difficult merely because they would not agree with him.

He was able to exert that pressure because he had a broad network, access to social media, and relationships with organizations that either failed to conduct proper due diligence or valued his modest contributions more than their own reputations.

By continuing to associate with him despite his conduct, those organizations compromised their credibility.

Jacobsen: There are several unfortunate realities in life. Some religious traditions encode them in elaborate stories, although more direct language can sometimes be more useful.

First, some people behave foolishly throughout their lives and repeatedly return to the same destructive patterns.

Second, many people who possess prominence or power do not deserve it. Life is unfair in that respect.

Third, not every person of status is just or intelligent. Some attain their positions through nepotism, manipulation, or institutional failure.

Fourth, some people cause enormous harm and leave others wishing only that the damage would stop. I am not wishing death on anyone involved in this story, but I understand the desire for an exhausting and destructive conflict to end.

Tsukerman: I understand. I still find it remarkable that one troll could create so much disruption and that so many people were intimidated by someone whose actual influence was limited.

Many of the people he pressured were already established and nearing the later stages of their careers. They did not need additional conflict, but it is difficult to understand what they truly feared losing.

They could have confronted him more firmly, ended the nonsense, or removed him from their organizations. Instead, they found his writing useful to their own work.

Because he was convenient to them, they were willing to sacrifice other people in order to remain on his good side. That kind of practical cowardice is what troubles me most.

Jacobsen: I could understand such behaviour more easily if the stakes were exceptionally high. If someone feared losing millions of dollars, a dream career, or the security of their family, an ignoble decision would still be wrong, but the motivation would at least be comprehensible.

What puzzles me is when people abandon their principles over matters of very little consequence.

Some people value power and influence for their own sake. When they are socially skilled, they do not need to be intellectually exceptional.

A person who understands how to manoeuvre within influential groups can rise despite offering mediocre or insubstantial ideas. Effective self-promotion can carry such people surprisingly far.

The ideas may be weak, but the personality can still be petty, ambitious, and destructive. That combination can cause significant damage.

Thank you very much, as always. Have a lovely day.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.

Image Credit: Irina Tsukerman and Scott Douglas Jacobsen.