Below are some of my observations of the comments made on my St. Patrick Day post by a man that shall thus forth be referred to as "The Hernán Cortés of Herbalism”.

So, Judson Carroll (a guy that claims to be a herbalist, yet simultaneously describes indigenous people which his books derive their ethnobotanical knowledge from as “vague remnants of paganism”) showed up on my Decolonizing St. Patrick`s day post to tell me he thinks it is bullshit and repeatedly yell about how he is part of “the one true religion”.

I found the whole interaction very interesting and illuminating.

He did the typical move (that the imperialist colonized minds of people with superiority complexes and insecurities will often do) where he pointed his finger at indigenous people (as a whole, globally, all glommed together in his mind) and said “Human sacrifices!”, “Savages!” and “Cannibals!” and he also told me how the abuses of indigenous children in Canada in the Residential Schools never happened! Tells me it was all a “hoax” to make Catholic people look bad and that he “saw it on the news”. Then he took a interesting turn and began projecting.

He started accusing me of being a “Bigot”, talking about how my writing is “no different then ones who hates ‘the blacks’ or Jews”. Apparently, referring to his fellow human beings as "the blacks” (based on the melanin content of their skin) is still a thing where he lives.

The whole vibe of his comments, had this disturbing ‘lets go on a bloody crusade to cleanse the world of non-believers!’ feeling to it. The self-righteousness and hatred in his words was palpable. Yet he would type the hateful words, and then accuse me of being hateful, very interesting projecting dynamics going on there.

I would describe the attitude of Judson Carroll (the “master herbalist”) as the attitude of a person that willingly embraces the role of an imperialistic colonizer, fully believes the overtly racist ideas pushed in The Doctrine Of Discovery (and its more modern legal manifestations/implications for indigenous peoples) and feels entitled to steal ancient herbal medicinal knowledge from indigenous wisdom keepers (while also calling them savages and saying they should either convert to being Catholic or just fade away and disappear as the “vague remnants of paganism” he perceives them and their diverse cultures to be).

For those that are not aware, here is a quote from The Doctrine Of Discovery which sums it up in a nutshell:

“Invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue. All Saracens and pagans whatsoever, And other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed… And reduce their persons to perpetual slavery…” (for more info: substack.com/@gavinmoun… )

That is the attitude of the Romanized, militarized, systemically corrupt Catholic church he puts on a pedestal. The same attitude people like Judson Carroll proudly support today.

This is the danger of dogmatic institutions being built up by imperialistic regimes claiming to offer absolute religious truths, sometimes, people like this Judson guy start to internalize the nonsense propaganda of these institutions and it results in them perceiving some of the members of the human family as less than.

In any case, the interaction offered an interesting cross section of thinking from the south for sure. It was an anthropologically educational cross section of southern Turtle Island inhabitant modern imperialist thinking. Offering a glimpse into the mind of a man that looks to the “news” and white supremacy based religious dogmas for truth, exploits the indigenous cultures for their medicines, and then tells the people he learned his herbalism from they are dirty savages.

The cognitive dissonance, present in the minds of individuals like that serve to highlight the truth in what I described in my St. Patrick article about how people with European heritage often have the most challenging time Decolonizing their minds. For some, they have so deeply internalized the lies and superiority complex delusions of their indigenous ancestor’s conquers, that they live in a totally fabricated delusion about who they are and how their indigenous ancestors lived.

I would link the comment, however, given he knew I would obviously highlight the fallacies of his statements, he blocked me (pics shown below).

Now, keep in mind, this guy showed up on my post, and I have never been to his page.

So now, he throws stones from the shadows and then runs away and blocks me. So his comment accusing me of nonsensical things is on my post, for others to see, but I am unable to respond.

This seems like a failure on the part of Substack’s setup, but oh well.. here it is documented.

I referred to this guy as “the Hernán Cortés of Herbalism”, as, in a similar way to the Conquistadors, he appears to be someone that wants to exploit the treasures of indigenous cultures (in this case herbal knowledge of medicine plants, which he plunders and extracts to then put in his books) as opposed to the Gold that Hernán Cortés and his buddies were after.

He wants to stripmine indigenous cultures of herbal knowledge like Elon Musk wants to stripmine the forests and mountains in the US for lithium, indifferent to the ecosystems they extract from, thinking themselves above and better than that which they seek to exploit.

Judson, like Hernán Cortés, wants to take treasures from indigenous people, claim them as his own, while looking down on those cultures in contempt. Such are the exploitative ways of the colonizer mentality.