Stella Morabito writes as the Federalist website about one Canadian professor who has generated protests for failing to adopt the latest trappings of campus craziness.
Jordan B. Peterson is a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. His lectures—many produced by TEDx—are popular on YouTube and include titles as wide-ranging as “Potential,” “The Necessity of Virtue,” and “Redefining Reality.” Many readers report being deeply influenced by his book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” which explores how and why divergent cultures produce similar myths and stories.
Today Peterson is laser-focused on fighting the cultural cancer of political correctness. He is alarmed at how quickly it is metathesizing into laws that seek to punish any and all self-expression. Such legislation—in his case, Canada’s bill C-16, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Code and Criminal Code to add “gender identity and expression” as a special category for anti-discrimination—is tailor-made to program people into conformity of thought. As with all things politically correct, such legislation always comes disguised in the language of “equality.”
Pointing this out is a herculean task today, and one Peterson seems to have taken on by himself. If he has colleagues who are also distressed, they probably don’t speak up out of fear of being smeared or fired. But there really is no alternative to loudly fighting political correctness. Peterson seems to have valiantly and quite sanely realized tenure is utterly worthless if the future holds nothing more than perpetual gagging by the thought police. Hopefully concerned colleagues will join him if this reality dawns on them before it’s too late.
When interviewed recently by Lauren Southern of Rebel Media at a free speech rally at the University of Toronto, Peterson made clear that even if his job is in jeopardy, the stakes are far too high to remain silent. “Something ugly is brewing,” he stated.
Indeed, if we leave political correctness to its own devices, totalitarianism is inevitable.