Mandatory Denunciations and the Case of Deeming v Pesutto

On 19 March 2023 at 10:59am, Melbourne women’s rights advocate Angie Jones tweeted the following message:

It was Sunday morning, the day after the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally hosted by British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen. On its website, Let Women Speak describes itself as “a global movement that creates space for women to centre women.” Why had Jones, who attended the rally, been spending time in its aftermath denouncing Nazis?

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The explanation was most likely the enormous pressure on attendees of the rally to do so, coming for the most part from social media. Twenty or so white men had staged their own protest on the steps of parliament at the same time as the Let Women Speak event, holding a banner that read ‘Destroy Paedo Freaks.’ The progressives of Melbourne had decided that ‘Paedo’ meant ‘trans’ and therefore that the men were there as part of the Let Women Speak event.

One of the men, all of whom were dressed in black bloc, was later identified as Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network, the white supremacist group the press described as ‘Nazis.’ Their stand against paedophilia—more plausibly related to a ‘protect the children’ protest happening at the same time in the same location—transformed the ordinary political activity of attending a rally for a women’s rights cause into “involvement in an anti-trans rights rally attended by neo-Nazis” (this was the ABC’s description of Liberal MP Moira Deeming’s attendance). Hence, the pressure to denounce: if you don’t denounce then you’re welcoming their support; and if you’re welcoming their support then you’re basically admitting that you have Nazi views.

Sunday 19 March was a happy day indeed for those who had opposed Let Women Speak all along, for now they had a bigger and better stick to beat feminists with, namely the claim that they were working with Nazis, or allied with Nazis, or had Nazis on their side.

A number of the women who attended the Let Women Speak rally experienced personal and professional repercussions from the online commentary and media reporting in the aftermath of the rally (myself included), but none was more severely impacted than MP Moira Deeming, who as a result of attending and helping to organise the rally was expelled from the Liberal parliamentary party room. In a Media Release of 19 March, Victorian Liberal Leader John Pesutto wrote:

Yesterday afternoon Victorians witnessed an abomination on the steps of the Victorian Parliament when neo-Nazi protesters engaged in an affront to the values we should all hold dear as Victorians. The violence, prejudice and hate that these protesters conveyed by their odious actions will never be acceptable in our State. I condemn them and commit to opposing such hate wherever it may exist. This afternoon I met with Moira Deeming MP who attended yesterday’s rally. I discussed her involvement in organising, promoting and participating in a rally with speakers and other organizers who themselves have been publicly associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists. At our meeting I informed Ms Deeming that I will move a motion at the next party room meeting to expel her as a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party as her position is untenable.

In this statement, Pesutto suggests there’s just one rally, which both Deeming and the “neo-Nazi protesters” were at, and claims that speakers and organisers of the Let Women Speak rally have had public associations with “neo-Nazi activists,” which, if true, would make it more believable that members of the National Socialist Network had shown up to the Let Women Speak event. Deeming sued Pesutto for defamation, and the case is now underway, having begun on Monday 16 September. It is predicted to run for three weeks.

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My take on the rally at the time, which wasn’t one of the many tweets shown in court last week (Pesutto’s barrister appeared to prefer tweets from anonymous accounts with silly names), was that the fact that the trans activists advertised their counterprotest to the Let Women Speak event with the slogan “fight the far-right!” made it unsurprising that the ‘far right’ showed up to fight back. But clearly the fact that the political opponents of Let Women Speak call them ‘the far right’ doesn’t make them the far right. And the actual far right showing up in response to provocation doesn’t make the far right feminists, either.

Pesutto’s defence against Deeming’s defamation charge rests on two charges of failure to denounce. The first is a failure to denounce ‘the Nazi element’:

Despite having seen the Nazi element present at the Rally, and having received counsel from Mr Southwick about what she should do, Deeming did not denounce the Nazi element at the rally unequivocally and promptly.

The second is a failure to denounce a tweet by Angie Jones. The tweet, posted on the afternoon of the Let Women Speak rally, reads “Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth. Why don’t you?” The defence claims that this tweet “served to… associate Jones with the NSN and neo-Nazis generally,” and that Deeming associated herself with Jones by co-hosting the rally with her and appearing in a video with her on the evening of the rally. (To recap: Deeming is linked to Jones, Jones has linked herself to neo-Nazis, therefore Deeming is linked to neo-Nazis.)

As stated in the defence document:

Deeming has never publicly denounced the Jones tweet or the sentiment it expressed, in circumstances where… public denunciation is self-evidently called for.

The general claim being made here is that sometimes we must denounce the things that other people say or do or else be assumed to agree with them and suffer the consequences. As a moral philosopher, this claim is interesting to me: can it really be true that we are by default implicated in what other people do, unless we say otherwise? The specific ethical claim is also interesting to me personally, for I attended the rally, and I did not denounce anyone. Indeed, I spent most of the aftermath of the rally making fun of the claim that denunciations were appropriate or necessary (until a wise colleague advised me to get the hell off Twitter, on the grounds that arguing with low-follower anonymous Twitter accounts is undignified for an academic).

I spoke with Angie Jones on Friday 20 September, the last day of the first week of Deeming v Pesutto, to get a better understanding of why she decided to make a denunciation and in particular, why she ended up concluding that the pressure to denounce was never actually about a belief that there was a feminist-Nazi alliance.

Holly Lawford-Smith: When you first became sure that the “men in black” (as they were being called in court this week) were members of the National Socialist Network, what was your sense of how you should respond?

Angie Jones: It never occurred to me that anyone could actually believe a women’s rights event would attract neo-Nazis. It was obvious to me that they turned up because the counter-protesters challenged them to. I was genuinely shocked when Dan Andrews and Adam Bandt linked the neo-Nazis to our event, rather than linking the neo-Nazis to the antifascists (the counter-protesters). So my initial response was, “why should I denounce those losers when they had nothing to do with us?”

HLS: You did eventually denounce the NSN men, and that was relied on in court this week by Deeming’s team. Why did you do that, and what were you hoping it would achieve?

AJ: I denounced them because it was confirmed they were neo-Nazis, not because they had anything to do with us.

HLS: You later tweeted something to the effect that those calling for you and other women to “denounce Nazis” don’t really want that, they just want to see you “bend & grovel.” Can you explain what you meant by this?

AJ: I knew it would be pointless to denounce them because nobody actually believes I have anything to do with Nazis or neo-Nazis. The people accusing me loudest were my former allies among the lefties/antifascists. To this day, it is ludicrous to me that we were ever linked to them. Nobody genuinely thinks a bunch of middle-aged women, mostly from the Left, who publicly agitate for women’s rights, had anything to do with neo-Nazis. So the only reason they want me to condemn them is to force me to comply to their will. I’m being punished for refusing to bow to men’s demands, so they want to see me on my knees begging for forgiveness. They want to humiliate me.

When she talks about “refusing to bow to men’s demands,” Jones is referring to all the male politicians and activists intent on forcing the public acceptance of trans activist ideology. These allies of trans activism say that a man who identifies as a woman is a woman; Jones says that is not true. For her, “denounce Nazis” means something like “you dared to say no to a man, now let’s see you repent.”

You might have thought the moral philosophers would have had something to say about the ethics of denouncing, but when I searched through our archive in preparation for this column I found little of use. Perhaps that’s because it’s hard to fit the idea of guilt by association into a liberal individualist political framework, according to which we are each responsible for our own actions, including our speech acts. There are some exceptions, for example when legal representatives act on our behalf, or when parents take responsibility for the actions of small children, or carers and legal guardians take responsibility for the actions of vulnerable people. But in the normal run of things, the only people responsible for unfurling a banner reading “Destroy Paedo Freaks” would be the people holding the banner, and the only people responsible for Sieg Heil-ing on the steps of parliament would be the people actually Sieg Heil-ing. It’s hard to see any case for instead blaming the women who happened to be gathered some distance away having their own event.

Nazis are bad, but they’re nearly all dead now (the youngest surviving Nazis are now in their 90s), and there probably aren’t any in Australia. White supremacists are bad, too, but they’re not Nazis. Having bad people nearby does not provide a clear reason to denounce anyone, because we’d first need a clear reason to assume that we all agreed with their actions unless we denounced them. That’s just not true. It makes sense only as a political strategy: it suits the opponents of feminism to claim to believe that if feminists don’t denounce Nazis then they are Nazis. The mainstream media and the leader of the Liberal Party took this political bait and have remained on the hook ever since. Let’s hope the judgement in Deeming v Pesutto helps to make clear that “public denunciation” is not “self-evidently called for.”