This is a long post about the terrible price some people pay when targeted by the woke mob.
Chadwick Seagraves
Chadwick Seagraves, an IT employee at NC State, was anonymously accused of being a Proud Boy and doxing Antifa members, as well as collecting information about Antifa on university time, accusations that he strongly denied:
I have been subjected to an organized campaign of slander composed of outright lies, half truths, and out of context claims initiated by anonymous anarchists and ‘antifascists’ that is designed to punish me and suppress my right to political expression using intimidation ... with the intent to destroy my career and reputation. I categorically denounce white supremacism [emphasis added] and, as a Constitutionalist and Free Speech Absolutist, I abhor the concept of fascism and authoritarianism of any sort.
As described by the Chancellor when he told our Faculty Senate that Seagraves would be keeping his job, NC State put Seagraves through the grinder, and even called in law enforcement (!), when it was clear from the very beginning that he did nothing wrong as an employee. University fair use policy allows employees wide latitude when using computers for personal non-criminal purposes, NC civil service laws protect employees from retaliation for their political beliefs, and by all reports he was a model employee.
He reached out to me after hearing about my case, and we briefly corresponded. I suggested we grab a beer, as I wanted to compare notes about his experiences with the university, and we decided to get together after Christmas break. He killed himself three weeks ago, leaving behind a wife and child.*
I’m kicking myself for not following up with him sooner – perhaps I could have helped him. Suicide is a terrible thing. It is devastating for your loved ones, and evidence suggests that suicide is like a communicable disease: the probability that one of your family members commits suicide jumps if you kill yourself. I wouldn’t wish it on the vilest white supremacist.
I don’t think most people know what Seagraves had to deal with, besides the threat of losing his job; here are some quotes from an email he sent me a few weeks ago:
They vandalized the house from which I had just moved, and, a month later, found the home I had just bought and vandalized two trucks and my driveway with gems like "die fash cracker" (which covered two whole concrete sections of my driveway and is still not fully removed), "snow roach", and 4-5 hammer and sickles, among other things. Almost ruined my marriage as well. I'm still in the midst of the 40K lawsuit brought against me by the spokeswoman for the Portland DSA. Fingers crossed that they eventually lose motivation. I have a real bulldog of a lawyer out there - former head of the GOP for Portland and probably the only real conservative lawyer in the state. Yes, they did bring in a third party to review all of my electronic history. I don't think it was law enforcement who did that though. Of course I had an SBI [State Bureau of Investigation] officer, representing the FBI, and also sent at the behest of the university, sitting in my kitchen on Jan 10th since a bunch of those idiots believed they saw me at the Capitol. I had security video showing me going in and out of my house all day. I'm fairly certain I had a Fed file before that, but I sure do now. I just assume everything I say or write is subject to disclosure and monitoring now. Several of my direct reports went on to file completely unfounded complaints against me with the campus BIRT [Bias Impact Response Team], but none of them were ever advanced because there was nothing I had done to discriminate against them. I've finally moved on to an uncomfortable, and almost normal again, working relationship with them. Speaking of uncomfortable, I think of you often as you continue working with your biased and duplicitous co-workers. I know how difficult it is to continue on with daily work in a den of wolves. I came up in my NCSU training under Susan Nutter's tenure, and she taught us everything there is to know about how to grind down, isolate, ostracize, and "legally" remove staff in higher ed.
If you think he wasn’t driven to suicide by the woke mob, there is this:
I know how ostracized and alone one feels. Had I not had children that depend on me, I would not have made it out alive. A statement they made me take out of my Technician article because I stated it took strength not to end it [emphasis added].
Mike Adams
His situation reminds me of Mike Adams, a conservative professor who in 2007 successfully sued UNC Wilmington in federal court for failing to promote him to full professor because of his conservative beliefs. Afterwards he was continually harassed by the university and its students, and even the Board of Governors was looking for a way to fire him because he was outspoken about his beliefs. He finally agreed to retire in August 2020 in exchange for a payment of a half million dollars. A week before he was due to retire, he killed himself.
I’ve asked around in conservative circles what happened, and no one seems to know for certain. I was told he divorced during his lawsuit, and that at one point he was hitting the bottle pretty hard. As far as I can tell, his payout was one of the largest ever paid to a conservative professor to just leave their job; usually universities offer someone one or two years of salary to go away, and his payout was about six years’ worth of salary. He was 55 when he died, and perhaps he realized that wouldn’t be enough money to live on until retirement? Or was it just the accumulated bitterness over the way Wilmington treated him all those years?
How the woke mob destroys you from within
Notice the similarities in both cases; I am also speaking from personal experience here. First, either you think you’re going to lose your job or you come under extreme pressure to quit. This is truly frightening, because losing employment threatens your ability to provide for your family, as well as your personal identity, because we get so wrapped up in our jobs in the U.S.
Next, the pressure never, ever stops. The mob keeps coming after you, doing its best to make your life miserable. You’re under constant scrutiny on the job; the university is just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can use it to get rid of you. As my attorney advised me after filing my lawsuit, “From this point forward, you have to cross every single t and dot every single i.” Or someone files a false claim against you, like Seagraves or Charles Negy. Worst case scenario, you lose your job, and at this point you are unemployable given how woke academia is.
At some point your marriage becomes strained, either because your spouse can’t handle the pressure or because your personality changes due to the stress; perhaps you’ve also been drinking yourself into a stupor every evening. When the strain becomes too much, you divorce. Of course, you’ll engage in suicidal ideation off and on.
I just finished reading a book about a famous tunnel escape from East Berlin during the Cold War, Tunnel 29. This passage sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But the Stasi were also pioneering more sophisticated tactics, such as zersetzung - 'decomposition'. This was a subtle art the Stasi perfected and taught at the Stasi Academy, of applying continuous pressure to people they didn't like, so they would feel as though their lives were falling apart. The Stasi had oversight over most jobs, not just in the army or government, but in universities or factories. If they didn't like you, a simple phone call to your boss or partner would end your career, break your marriage, until you felt completely powerless, leading some to commit suicide (p. 37).
This quote from a neighbor about Mike Adams is illuminating:
I was interested in talking to him once I found out exactly what he was all about,” neighbor Bryan Hanley told the newspaper. “I was like, ‘How do you handle that much pressure on you? You know nationwide people turned against you. How do you handle something like that? How do you handle that kind of stress?
How, indeed?
How am I holding up?
I spoke with an attorney once about a professor who seemed to have a strong case against his university, but who settled for only a single year of salary. I was baffled at his choice. Their response was that most people can’t handle the pressure and stress of a lawsuit; they just want it all to go away, so they take a pittance and move on. Which explains why so many people, regardless of their walk of life, grovel when the woke mob comes for them; they know what lies ahead and realize they are too weak to face the crucible.
So why am I different from most other people? I’ll share a story with you that until now only my family and a few very close friends knew. I never discuss it because it was such a low point in my life.
I was in the Naval ROTC during college; I wanted to serve my country and become an officer in the Marine Corps. Part of the training included a six-week stint at Officer Candidate School in the summer after junior year. I am prone to stress fractures, and showed up with one in my leg, so they sent me home. I returned the summer after graduating, this time lasting about halfway through before developing a painful stress fracture in my foot. I went to the corpsman, declared not physically qualified, and was pulled out of training. The Marine Officer Instructor at my university was a great guy, and I begged him for a third chance; these were quite rare. He pulled some strings and got me into the 10-week Officer Candidate Course, a non-NROTC route into the Corps.
About six weeks in, we were doing routine physical training and I started to feel shocks of pain in my right leg. During the platoon run the pain became worse, and I started lagging behind the platoon. I knew what was happening and thought, fuck it, I am not stopping, no matter what happens, no matter how bad it gets. My running turned into a half-run, half-hobble, and then my right tibia cracked all the way through. I couldn’t put pressure on it without collapsing from the pain. The corpsman on duty didn’t realize what had happened, so I spent the night in my rack with a broken leg. When the x-rays came back the next morning, they rushed me to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they put my right leg in a cast from my toes to my crotch. The Marine Corps bid me adieu, and after recovering I decided to go to graduate school on a whim.
I learned a valuable lesson on that gravel road in Quantico: my willpower is so strong that I will withstand intense pain and even destroy my own body to accomplish a goal.
So I won’t be killing myself anytime soon, and I certainly won’t be bending the knee to these bastards. The suicides of Adams and Seagraves make me more determined than ever to fight back against the woke mob: our nation won’t survive if people are hounded to death simply because they express an unpopular opinion. As Bari Weiss recently wrote, in an epidemic of cowardice, the antidote is courage. We can’t turn the tide unless folks are willing to stand up and fight back, regardless of the personal price we pay.
I suspect there are quite a few people out there who were driven to suicide after cancellation by the woke mob. We never hear about them because suicide is so shameful for their families. It’s rare for it to be mentioned in obituaries as a cause of death, and it usually only comes out when the person who commits suicide is well-known, like Mike Adams. If you know of anyone, please contact me. These people should not be forgotten.
If you would, please consider contributing to my legal fund for my free speech lawsuit against NC State. I’ve borrowed against my retirement accounts and refinanced my house to cover my legal fees, but I need your help; I can’t do this alone.
*To my knowledge, Seagraves’ official cause of death has not been released. The news reports make it pretty clear that it was suicide:
Chadwick Seagraves, the embattled NC State IT administrator at the center of a student protest last January, has died, possibly by suicide. Although the medical examiner has not released the autopsy yet, The Free Pack traveled to Johnston County and interviewed eyewitnesses who attest a single gunshot rang out from Seagrave’s residence moments before his house burst into flame.
Investigators say the owner of a home in Johnston County was found dead in his burned out home. Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell told WRAL News that deputies were called to the home around 5 p.m. on Saturday. Neighbors reported seeing a man outside with a gun before the fire. When deputies arrived, the man went back inside, and a short time later the fire started, they said.
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