Richard Warman puts teenaged girl in danger, admits he just “doesn’t care”

(See updates below.)

This is the fourth installment of my new blog feature called “Bigoted Canadian Human Rights Commission Comment of the Day”. But this one is more than just a bigoted post to a neo-Nazi website written by the CHRC’s star complainant and former employee, Richard Warman. It’s a bigoted post to a neo-Nazi website that put a 19-year-old girl’s life in danger.

 

Some background: Elizabeth Lampman (pictured at left) was a girl who got introduced to some bad people through her former boyfriend. He was a white supremacist, and she followed along. Richard Warman hauled her before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for “hate speech”. There’s no telling what violence a 90-pound teenaged girl could have done to our democracy.

Unlike some of Warman’s other targets, Elizabeth didn’t dig in and fight. She wasn’t committed to the neo-Nazi ideology – she had gone along with her boyfriend, and he was just an ex-boyfriend now, so her dalliance with his views was done, too. Elizabeth, unlike some of Warman’s other targets, really didn’t care much about the broader principles of censorship and free speech. She just wanted to go back to a normal life again.

She was just out of high school, and she wanted to get her life back on track.

So she did what the CHRC claims it wants people to do: she recanted. She changed her mind about the slogans she had been mindlessly repeating. In a “mediation” session with the government, she wrote a heart-felt letter, a scan of which you can see here. Here is the text of it; it’s really quite touching:

July 31, 2004

C/O Canadian Human Rights

Att’n Nancy LaLonde

Senior Complaints Analyst

I apologize for offending you or anyone else with the websites that I was associated with. I am no longer affiliated with those beliefs or the movement and haven’t been for awhile. I realize how wrong it was and completely removed myself from it… I was not raised to be that way. I was raised in a Christian family, and was taught to help others in need and love everyone regardless of race, religion or culture. My parents taught us we are all equal. I was led astray by an ex boyfriend and now realize the mistake I made in following him and being associated with him and his beliefs. That isn’t me. I was the girl in grade school who befriended the new girl when nobody wanted to play with her because she was black.

I was wrong in following that crowd and am sincerely sorry for anyone I may have hurt or offended through my actions. I am truly ashamed for having strayed so far from the good things I was taught. I am in the process of regaining my parents trust and this is a step in that direction. I hope you will accept my apology for my past misdoings.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Lampman

That’s a beautiful letter. It was a private letter, a letter sent to the CHRC as part of a compromise, whose rules guarantee that such letters are confidential. But as the RCMP and Privacy Commissioner’s investigations tell us, the CHRC just doesn’t give a damn about the privacy of mere citizens.

Formal section 13 “hate speech” charges against Elizabeth were dropped. But that didn’t satisfy Richard Warman. He had spent all that time undercover as a neo-Nazi, he managed to smoke out Elizabeth’s real identity, he managed to reel her in, like the skilled fisherman of Nazis he was, he had her on ice, heading into the CHRC’s anti-hate cannery. Another victory would be his – and perhaps some well-earned, tax free money for his “pain and suffering”.

And then… Elizabeth was let go! How unfair to him! He had fought with a prize swordfish for countless hours, and then someone threw her back out to sea! Elizabeth got away. Damn that Elizabeth! Damn her contrition! Warman had been robbed of his opportunity to do “maximum disruption” to her life.

But he wasn’t done yet. If Warman couldn’t get his pound of flesh from her using the CHRC, he could always do so using one of his many Nazi disguises. And so he did.

Elizabeth’s letter was sent to the CHRC and Warman – no-one else. And on October 22, 2004, Warman did what he often did: he pretended to be a Nazi called Axetogrind, and he published Elizabeth’s letter on the Vanguard News Network, the neo-Nazi website. Here’s what he wrote on that website:

PM Hale hasn't even finished his fight, but already we've seen many 'leader's' in the Church run for the exit. With friends like these...

www.onepeoplesproject.com/lampman.pdf

We should all keep our fingers crossed for PM Hale on the 15th.

Warman had leaked Elizabeth’s letter to an “anti-hate” website, which dutifully posted it for him to that link, above. (That link no longer works.)

Warman posed as an outraged neo-Nazi betrayed by Elizabeth, linking to the letter he pretended he had "discovered", telling his fellow VNN members that they should be outraged, too.

The very next neo-Nazi who commented on the website followed Warman’s suggestion. He wrote:

Talk about kissing Jew Boots!

Friends, that’s called spreading hatred. Not something that’s “likely” to spread hatred. It actually did spread it. Warman broke a confidence, broke the CHRC’s rules, broke his lawyer’s professional code of ethics, and broke section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

And he managed to get neo-Nazis denouncing Jews again.

(The rest of the post refers to Matthew Hale, a neo-Nazi leader who was sentenced to 40 years in an American jail for trying to arrange an assassination of a judge. Warman shows his support for Hale – “we should all keep our fingers crossed” for Hale’s legal appeal, clearly approving of Hale’s conduct. And while praising someone convicted for plotting a murder, he happens to reveal Elizabeth’s private disavowal of neo-Nazism.)

All of that is scandalous. But none of that is particularly remarkable at the CHRC, which has become a culture so rotten that they proudly hired a police officer thrown off her force for corruption.

If Warman couldn’t get his vengeance through the CHRC, perhaps he could get some of the neo-Nazis over at VNN to do his dirty work for him.

Was that a real risk? Could Elizabeth really get hurt? I don’t know; personally, I think that Warman and others who make their living fighting against “hate” have a vested interest in telling the rest of us that there is a lot of dangerous hate out there, so we’d better give them money and power to fight it. I’m skeptical. But Warman and the CHRC and the Canadian Jewish Congress tell us that these Internet neo-Nazis are a real danger – not just blowhards. If they really believe that, then Warman deliberately and knowingly put Elizabeth in jeopardy of violence.

A 19-year-old girl.

Nice.

Here’s what Warman had to say about it, under oath, before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. See page 992 of the transcript:

MS KULASZKA: …I want to put to Mr. Warman that someone in good faith wrote that letter and the next thing she knows you posted it all over the Internet on a site where she recants beliefs that probably many of these people believe in. Did it ever occur to you that this might lead to some problems for her? You're a person who is very concerned about your security. How about her security?

MR. WARMAN: You've asked a bit of a compound question, so the overall answer is no.

MS KULASZKA: You weren't concerned about her security?

MR. WARMAN: No. Again, you asked a compound question, so if you wish to break it down then I'll respond to it. But if you are just continuing with it as a global five-part question, then is answer is no...

MS KULASZKA: Did it ever occur to you that you could put her security in jeopardy?

MR. WARMAN: Sorry, can you refer me --

THE CHAIRPERSON: Page 12.

MR. WARMAN: No, I don't believe it's the type of letter that would do that.

MS KULASZKA: Then you don't believe the people who frequent this forum would ever do anything to jeopardize her security, correct?

MR. WARMAN: That's not what I said.

MS KULASZKA: The truth is, Mr. Warman, you didn't care, correct?

MR. WARMAN: If that's a real question and not a rhetorical, the answer is no.

There are other stunning parts of the transcript -- how the CHRC's lawyer, Giacomo "Serenity Now" Vigna, tries to shut down questioning about Elizabeth; how Tribunal chairman Athanasios Hadjis is, well, his usual biased, confused, lazy self. And there's Warman's convenient "forgetfulness" about who he leaked the letter to -- he couldn't recall. It really is worth a read.

Warman put a woman's life in jeopardy for kicks. She was no longer a "suspect" or an "accused" or a threat of any sort. The CHRC was done with her. But he wasn't. There was no purpose to his post other than raw, punitive vengeance.

That’s the hero of the Canadian Jewish Congress. That’s the ethical standard of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That’s the man who continues to work at the Department of National Defence, as their director of “special grievances”.

Fire. Them. All.

UPDATE: As per the sensible advice of several commenters, I have altered the photo of Elizabeth. I also acknowledge, as I did in a previous post, that a letter like Elizabeth's loses its authenticity when it is written under coercion, which by definition includes any "mediation" with the state. That said, the letter did seem credible, and genuine. But that's not the point: the point is, Elizabeth was free to go, as far as the CHRC was concerned. That clearly frustrated Warman, who threw her to the wolves on VNN.