My efforts to think globally and act locally will be known to those with some familiarity with this Substack blog. On the local end of the equation, I have been focusing on explaining the ins and outs of my engagement with the leadership of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. In spite of its determined efforts to deplatform me in 2016-18, I remain Emeritus Professor at the U of L. Its a long story that continues to unfold to this day. This is a very recent chapter in that story.
My ongoing academic dispute with some leadership factions at the U of L picked up intensity last February as the unresolved conflict bubbled over into a violent episode which I have described as the the incursions of a “Native Rights Mob.” This seminal item, dated Feb 10, is published here in this Substack. I’m especially invigorated by trying to do justice to the kind of engaged reportage, written on the fly from the front lines of unfolding controversy.
Now the University of Lethbridge is caught up in another episode that raises serious questions about what has been going on there. What is it about the pedagogical culture of this place that, as I have seen, causes seemingly rational students to quite literally try to hurt, harm, and disable those they see as opponents to their sloganeering group think?
Along with my controversial colleague, Dr. Frances Widdowson, we have been pushing for an investigation of the act of violence we witnessed and were stung by on Feb. 4 over a period of several hours. In that period the University administration had to call in local police who ended up providing Frances and I together with our two respective spouses, physical protecting from the hostile incursions of the Native Rights Mob. These attacks were directed our way by militant student bullies.
The shocking actions of the Mob on that day provides a window into a style of violence encouraged from on high. We see this genre of violence sneaking into the style of tainted pedagogy embraced, for instance, by the University of Lethbridge.
Another piece of the evidence we have been assembling popped up on June 22 in Montreal where a U of L student attempted to assassinate a top official at Pornhub, the biggest and most visible pornography platform on the Internet. In response the student died in the onslaught of bullets he set off with his effort to stalk and murder his target.
This episode of premeditated extreme violence was instigated by Seth Scott Hatfield following his graduation with honours from the University of Lethbridge. Hatfield, who majored in Philosophy, made it onto the Dean’s honour role.
After the graduation rituals simmered down with his large Lethbridge area family, Hatfield headed straight for Montreal with the seeming intention of murdering what he considered was a top person in charge of Pornhub. Dressed in battle gear, Seth met his mortality in a blaze of gun fire. A Montreal police officer and a bystander also died in the fiasco.
Seth explained his reason for mounting an attack in a “Manifesto.” The content of this document seems to fit the case well, but its contents have not yet been conclusively proven to be the work of Seth Hatfield.
If Seth indeed wrote it, which it seems he did, the Manifesto assumes considerable importance. It would also be important if it turned out to be a sophisticate forgery. Let’s move on with the view the Manifesto is what it says it is.
The contents of the Manifesto are already weaving their way into academic commentary and political discourse. The length and the concentrated effort that went into formulating such a manuscript, means he probably composed it in Lethbridge before leaving for Montreal.
One can picture the Manifesto as an extension of the many academic papers he must have written along the way to his graduation with honours. The text constitutes a serious document exhibiting considerable deliberation and self-reflection especially in the parts where the author describes his pain and suffering; where he explains his view of the dire conditions of the world these days.
The style of the text approaches what one might expect from a candidate attempting to demonstrate his abilities in an application for graduate school. The thesis presented, however, lays out a pathway for the author to end up in jail or a morgue. It leads away from further academic refinement and cultivation in the mills of higher education.
When Seth left his home town carrying his treatise and his rifle with him, he must have been aware it was unlikely that he would ever return. Cutting through the academic jargon and the theoretical sophistry running through parts of Seth’s earnest attempt to formulate a learned exposition, it seems to me that much of his devastation emanates from a single harsh realization.
Like many young men of his generation, he had concluded that the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that it is very unlikely that he would ever find a loyal partner and friend to build a stable family with kids… a stable family resembling the ones that held together the social cohesion of all the generations before him.
What are the odds of finding a female partner willing settle down to mother kids in a country where the birth rate of native born-Canadians is about half the rate to merely maintain the population. In other words, every pair of Canadians reproduce only one offspring. Motherhood and fatherhood are just not what they used to be.
It would be wrong to sweep aside Seth’s case an aberration; as a single bad apple in a barrel of good apples. By sending out such a desperate SOS of criminal despair at the flower of his youthful energy, Seth made a startling decision to assassinate the person he identified as the spear of the arrow pushing to exploit and normalize pornography.
Seth’s actions push to the surface the violence rumbling beneath our society’s integration of artificial digital sexualization. This development carries significant implications for the expression of sexuality, or lack thereof, in real time between actual people. One statistic emerging from Pornhub is that more time is spent these days by people watching porn rather than engaging in actual sexual intercourse.
https://nationalpost.com/longreads/pornhub-possibly-canadas-greatest-export
Pornography, which can be chronically addictive for some people, has been a significant element and driving force in the evolution of the Internet since its inception. Now it has become a big industry whose officers have to worry about public perceptions of their business models.
It turns out that one of the global centres of the pornography business is Côte-des-Neiges in Montreal. Who knew that, according to The National Post, “porn is possibly Canada’s biggest export”? Is one result of Justin Trudeau’s prime ministerial attack on the oil and gas industry, that the oil and gas sweet spot in Canada’s political economy has been overtaken by exports of the porn industry based largely in Trudeau’s Montreal?
https://nationalpost.com/longreads/pornhub-possibly-canadas-greatest-export
When Scott Hatfield arrived in Montreal he checked into the Hilton Hotel across the street from the world headquarters of the multinational Aylo corporation. Aylo is one of the holding corporations of Pornhub and several other pornography assets. It has branches around the world including in many tax havens.
When Seth arrived at the Hilton he began firing his long gun at the windows of Aylo Corp from which was just across the street. Later Seth attempted to enter the Aylo building to track down his target. The response was that a large police operation quickly coalesced. The specifics of what happened are shrouded in secrecy that might have been revealed in a trial. Since Seth is now dead, however, it doesn’t appear that there will be a trial. How convenient for the authorities.
There is, however, an ongoing investigation let by the Sûreté du Québec which has called on Lethbridge Services to investigate the lead up to Seth’s lethal foray to Montreal. How much can local police be trusted to investigate properly the inner workings of a University whose Administration ordered local police to give the Administration political cover.
On the basis of the events of Feb. 4, members of the Lethbridge Police Service declared Dr. Widdowson to be a trespasser who would be arrested if she set foot on campus? She did visit a student on campus and then was handcuffed, arrested and carried away in a police van all on camera. See my Substack, April 29
Many news organizations responded to the story of the shooter and the porn company immediately. As is often the case, the police operated within the context of a seemingly pre-pared media campaign. Right from the early stages of the reportage a strong theme of the media interpretation was to indict the deceased Seth, who can no longer speak for himself. He was presented as an example of the supposedly reprehensible incels. Seth did not refer to himself as an incel.
The term incel is a short form for “involuntarily celibate.” In the 1990s the idea of involuntarily celibate men or women of no specific age, became a theme that drew together several Internet communities. Those who joined up wished to discuss their dilemma of wanting a mate but not being able to jump through the hoops to find one.
In recent years the idea of being incels has caught on with some young men in the 18 to say 35 range They discuss what they believe is a gender disadvantage for heterosexual men of modest means with shaky and unremarkable careers. Such men are prone to become increasingly hampered by scars when it comes to dating, courting, mating and marriage.
Many Gen Z men can hardly fail to notice they have shrinking access to good jobs in a failing, debt-laden DEI economy. They are not without justification perceiving that the present social structures and mores give a significant advantage especially to attractive women, some of whom have learned to deploy sex as an item of barter to gain expensive thrills, upward mobility, and maybe even lifelong financial security. The gender balance could work the other way around for sure. But at present the odds are against widened opportunities for would-be gigolos.
In response, some young men without a magic carpet to fame, fortune and political influence try to reckon with the reality that it seems, time and time again, that they are left in the dust in the extremely competitive milieu that prevails these days in the marketplace of relationships.
One of the pathetic consolation prizes in the incel dilemma is easy access to ubiquitous digital porn. Porn, however, can become a sword to the pride and self-esteem of manhood. Porn can get in the way of developing the commitment and stability required in extrapolating the act of courting into family life. Porn is no replacement for the kind of expectations that animated past generations when men and women partners built up themselves and their country by creating new wealth through hard work in prolific families.
It seems that the Seth Hatfield case is presenting fodder for the rhetoric of some woke feminists who are putting a devastating spin on so-called incels. The deceased Seth is being transformed into the poster boy of a supposedly uniform tribe now presented as a “misogynistic hate group” accused of failing to cope compliantly with the aftermath of a sexual revolution, a revolution that had a few good points as well as a lot of bad ones.
The Global News spin doctor, Toura Izri, wasted no time in comparing Seth Hatfield’s targeting of Pornhub with the shooting in Montreal in 1989 of 14 women at École Polytechnique. Izri also used her podium to plug the Carney government’s infatuation with further censorship of the Internet in enactments such as the atrocious Online Harms Act, Bill C-9. One of the aims of the legislation and of the people behind it is said to be to hunt down “abusive content to prevent young men from being radicalized.” Who defines was is radical and what is normal?
There are broad implications for many institution in Seth Hatfield’s violent outburst aimed at Pornhub and all it represented to him. From what I have seen so far, the case is jam packed with inconsistencies involving media reporting, police work, business machinations and a hush hush silence from the local institutions where the shooter was educated. Lethbridge police are investigating the U of L and Catholic Central High School.
In the early reports it seemed like Seth was being held in police custody. The shooter did not succeed in executing the CEO of Aylo Corp but the deceased people did include Montreal police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane and bystander Michel Mizrahi.
None of the early news reports I saw gave the name of the CEO of Pornhub’s holding company. My research led me Aylo Corp’s CEO, Scott Montgomer. This same individual also calls himself Scott Montgomery in other contexts. It seems the man Scott tried to target makes minor modifications in his name, possibly for the purposes of legal chicanery as a key figure in a very litigious milieu.
Ethical Capital Partners is the holding company above Aylo. So far its officers have stayed out of the controversy stirred up Seth’s violent episode near a capital of the pornography industry in Canada and worldwide.
Rabbi Solomon Friedman, originally from Ottawa Ontario, is a key figure in guiding the pornography industry, including Pornhub, through its changing relationships with the law, government, and public opinion. One of the ironies he deals with is the importance of pornography in some law cases. Some of these cases have a significant bearing determining the limitations and scope of free expression.
The issue of freedom of expression is essential in the work I am doing with Dr. Frances Widdowson in calling for an end to the subversion by the University of Lethbridge in its academic mission.
https://time.com/7017403/solomon-friedman-pornhub-ethical-interview/
Seth Hatfield majored in Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge. I came to know fairly well some members of the Philosophy Department, prominent among them Professor Paul Viminitz.
A new recruit was brought into the Philosophy Department to replace Prof. Viminitz after he was fired.
The unusual, ill-resolved firing involved Dr. Viminitz’s refusal to respond to anonymous complaints, many of them related to the professor’s decision to invite the controversial Dr. Widdowson to speak on campus. An erudite hard-talking Jewish controversialist, Prof. Viminitz was intent on presenting an academic platform for Dr. Widdowson to talk about her politically incorrect body of work. This work included analysis and criticism of the corruption she associates with “the Aboriginal industry.”
Some of Dr. Widdowson’s publications pertain to the role of Indian residential schools in Canadian history. From Frances’ perspective this topic has become overrun with sacred cows. She has applied some of her study of the schools to her negative assessment of the work between 2009 and 2015 of the Truth and Reconciliations Commission.
The Commission, led by Anishinabenine Judge Murray Sinclair, has focused considerable efforts on looking at the ongoing effects if these colonial boarding schools which have generated such extreme antagonisms. In their day, which is not that long ago, these schools represented a classic merger of church and state in Canadian Indian Affairs.
For her critical view of the orthodoxy condemning everything about these schools as uniformly bad and reprehensible, Frances has been labelled as a “residential school denier.” That catch term has become a major buzz phrase animating the enforcers of political correctness in the various rituals Dr. Widdowson has experienced in her efforts to bring forward her politically incorrect analysis.
The response of many students, staff and administrators to even the prospect of Dr. Widdowson being on campus to discuss her dissident interpretations, was elevated into some kind of institutional emergency. It began in January of 2023 when Dr. Mike Mahon, then the U of L’s President, slammed the door shut on his prior agreement to join Prof. Viminitz’s in inviting Frances to speak at the U of L.
Dr. Mahon cancelled his own agreement that Dr. Widdowson should address from a University podium, a public lecture directed at the broader Lethbridge community. In cancelling the talk Dr. Mahon also slammed the door on the dwindling vivacity of academic freedom at our own University.
The U of L’s CEO decided a to disinvite Dr Widdowson creating a growing antagonism that Frances has experienced in the course of various spurning events expelling her from public places from Feb. 1 of 2023 to Feb. 4, 2026.
After Philosophy Prof. Viminitz was fired at the U of L he was replaced by Instructor Jason Breen. Jason Breen did his BA and MA work at Memorial University in Newfoundland. He is presently working on his doctorate at York University in Toronto. Jason Breen is a self-declared Marxist who includes in his teaching commentary on the role of violent revolution in the making of history. It is natural for him do so. But advocating violent action to advance revolutionary change is another matter.
Revolutionary change is an important academic subject when it comes to studying the exercise of power and how it is altered. Some revolutions, but especially the American Revolution, are widely eulogized. Other revolutions, like say the Islamic Revolution of 1979, is widely demeaned in the West. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
Thus the study of revolutionary activism does have and should have its own important niche in the academy. The purpose of Universities is largely to identify and illuminate reality and truth, not to veil and distort reality in order to adhere to what is expedient, profitable, and politically exploitable.
https://www.ulethbridge.ca/directory/person/jason.breen
Clearly Seth Hatfield, a self-proclaimed Marxist, saw himself as an agent of violent revolution who was ready to play the ultimate price in advancing the cause he outlined in his Manifesto. Although we cannot easily say what caused him to step over the red line, we can make some educated guesses. Let’s back up a bit to put the violent episode in Montreal in the context of what has been unfolding in Lethbridge.
Did some combination of influences in the Philosophy Department and throughout the University contribute to the phenomenon we saw on Feb. 4 when the Native Rights Mob set out to damage, demean and hurt people who they thought disagreed with their view of the appropriate place of Aboriginal peoples in Canada? Does the academic nature of the Manifesto accompanying Seth Hatfield’s fall over the abyss of lethal violence, have roots in some fundamental flaws in the nature of the pedagogy on offer at the University of Letbridge?
A precautionary note. Regardless of whatever was put before him at the U of L, Seth Hatfield was an adult when he died in a barrage of bullets. He was responsible for his own actions. No one can say for sure, at least at this early point, what was the effect of this lecture or that lecture, of this professor or that professor, on Seth’s resolve to carry out his attack highlighting the role of pornography as something to be violent attacked.
That being said, when Jason Breen was summing up his Philosophy course last spring, he concluded with some observations that startled Michael Schmidt. Schmidt has a BA and is scholarship-winning mature student.
Before sending students off for summer break, Breen is said to have signed off in his final lecture by explaining that there are lots of farmers in Alberta. These farmers have easy access to fertilizer that can be mixed with Diesel to make cheap and effective bombs. Apparently he attached this idea about bomb-making to current tensions around AI data centres and the independence movement in Alberta. According to Schmidt, he was not the only student surprised and troubled by Breen’s conclusions to the course. He says about 50 students heard what Instructor Breen had said.
Michael Schmidt majors in Political Science but he took some Philosophy classes. He is uncertain if Seth heard Instructor Breen’s lecture. He does not know what profs taught the late Mr. Hatfield, although the Philosophy Department is small and he must have had much exposure to many of its faculty. Right now it seems there are lots of questions but few definitive answers.
In a recent video discussion with Frances Widdowson I introduced the rough outlines of the U of L’s connections to the Seth Hatfield shooting tragedy. Given the centrality of pornography issues that are increasingly important but rarely discussed, at least in public discourse, there is no telling where this story might be headed. It offers a window into matters that should no longer be subjected to the hush hush approach especially at universities. Seth obviously wanted to generate thought and debate. He wanted to leave a legacy. He has done so.
I introduced the outlines of the story in the taping of the You Tube below focusing on how student Harley Garlarneau, a participant in the Native Rights Mob, perceived what happened at the University of Lethbridge. What next?
https://themeliorist.ca/2026/07/04/the-actuality-of-the-widdowson-protest/
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