A Professor Against Political Correctness

I first encountered Jordan Peterson on a YouTube video when he was part of a Free Speech event on the University of Toronto Campus. At this event protesters called him all sort of names, they unplugged the sound system and created so much white noise so that the speakers could not talk.

I had seen this type of event happen before, but this time something seemed different. I slowly realized that the things Professor Peterson was saying were articulate and well thought out versions of what I had in my mind.

I had to know more about this person. Thanks to the power of the internet I was able to find hours of video on YouTube. The first ones I arrived at were his videos against Bill C-16 that was being discussed in the Canadian Parliament.

Bill C-16

Professor Peterson made three videos where he addressed his issues with this piece of legislation. The series is called Professor against Political Correctness (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In these videos he talks about the law itself as well as the doctrine and ideas behind the law and those who are pushing for it.

Little did Professor Peterson know that his three videos on an obscure piece of Canadian legislation would attract global attention. He simply thought the law crossed a line that he would not cross, the codification of compelled speech into law.

In his videos he even says that the act of making the videos could be interpreted as illegal under the Ontario human rights commission. He was told he was overreacting at the time but the University of Toronto sent him a letter telling him that he needed to take down the videos and what he was doing was probably illegal, providing justification for his earlier fear.

This stance brought a lot of attention to Professor Peterson, not all of it positive, and started him on the road of speaking tours and a new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Activist Assault

“This is like neutrally playing a speech by Hitler, or Milo Yiannopoulos.” Said Professor Nathan Rambukkana of Wilfred Laurier University.

The quote was uttered during an interrogation of teaching assistant Lindsey Shepard. She was being reprimanded for playing a video of Jordan Peterson in her university classroom. A video that was played on Canadian TV station TVO, broadcasted to the public and at the time of this writing has been seen close to 1 million times on YouTube.

Before this protesters at McMaster University tried to shut down a talk given by Jordan Peterson by making a lot of noise and using air horns to drown him out. Peterson ignored them and kept on talking, eventually moving the talk outside and giving it there.

More recently a surreal scene took place at a talk at Queens College as protestors interrupted the speech by jumping on stage. Another shouted from the audience, while protestors outside banged on windows and doors. Shouts of ‘lock them in and burn it down’(3:44) could be heard as other protesters attempted to block the door from the outside using trash cans. One protestor, who broke a window, was arrested carrying a garrote.

Along with these protests numerous smears have been made against Peterson in the media. He has been called alt-right, a homophobe, and transphobe to name a few, despite identifying as an English Liberal.

The personification of this assault can best be seen in an interview Peterson did with Cathy Newman on England’s Channel 4. One thing that becomes clear in that interview is that the strawman built up of who Peterson is does not hold up to reality.

Sorting it Out

With all the bad press and protests how do you figure out what Peterson is actually about? Go to the source. He has hundreds of hours of videos on YouTube, from college lectures to personal videos recorded in his home.

You could read his books, Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos or check out his public speaking events.

Jordan Peterson is known to give advice such as ‘clean your room’ imploring people to physically clean their room and in doing so taking control of a small part of their world. Setting it in order so that it is clean, functional, and beautiful. It is a call to set your own life in order before you try to criticize or change the world.

Rule 4 from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is ‘Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.’ A call to do something no matter how small to make yourself slightly better than you were the day before. Imagine how much better you would be after a month of doing that every day.

So why has Peterson garnered so much attention? For those who are interested in his ideas he offering them a message of personal responsibility and individuality. For those how see him as alt-right (he is not by the way) they fall into a few different camps. Those who have only heard about him as a transphobe second hand and believe it without checking him out for themselves and those who see him as a threat to their ideological and cultural hegemony.

Yet do not take my word for it, I encourage you to look for yourself. If you are interested in hearing it straight from Jordan Peterson, he has a speaking event at the Keller Auditorium in Portland Oregon on June 25. There will also be a book club conversation about his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos in Beaverton Oregon on June 23^rd.

Media Conspiracy or Out of Control Group Think?

The above video is of an interview that was uploaded to YouTube on January 16^th 2018. Cathy Newman, a Channel 4 News reporter, interviewed Jordan Peterson, a professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, who has attracted a massive following by telling people to ‘clean up their room’ and ‘tell the truth.’

After this interview was posted it immediately went viral, the original YouTube video has been viewed 2,900,851 times with 114,597 up votes and 2,417 down votes and 55,324 comments at the time of this writing.

Shortly after this interview, claims were made by Channel 4 that ‘threats’ have been made against Newman and that they were bringing in additional security. It was at this time that the media smear machine went to work, attempting to paint Peterson, through the actions of his ‘followers’ as a sexist, misogynist ‘alt-right’ bigot.

These media outlets are attempting to use character assassination in order to attempt to salvage their narrative, even if they have to mislead to do so.

The Threats

According to Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, Cathy Newman has been on the receiving end of “vicious misogynistic abuse, nastiness, and threat” and that it is “[A] terrible indictment of the times we live in.”

According to the Independent, security experts have been hired by Channel 4 and they are considering police involvement.

When asked for proof of these threats very little is forth coming. According to The Daily Mail the ‘abuse’ included comments such as ‘RIP Cathy Newman’ and ‘Cathy Newman we know where you live.’

That last statement seem ominous to be sure, but no screen shots or images are provided as proof. They go on to say that more than 500 postings have been made calling Newman a bitch. The Daily Mail also claims that Newman’s 13-year-old daughter found a pornographic mock-up on Instagram of her mother with Dr. Peterson.

They go on to claim that Peterson’s “admirers” attacked Newman by describing her in a comment as the “Low IQ Left Establishment” and saying that she should be “ashamed of such a catastrophic interview.”

The Daily Mail continues saying that critical comments were expected but the death threats have caused serious alarm. Yet they do not provide any examples of these death threats. No quote is mentioned nor a screen shot shared.

The Threats seem to amount to people saying mean things to her on the internet.

The Headlines

These are some of the headlines describing this story. Clearly they are misleading, either for ideological reasons or for clicks.

The Independent says that the abuse was misogynistic and that it is all just a backlash against the #MeToo movement.

 

The Daily Mail calls the interview a ‘row’ and calls Peterson an ‘anti-feminist.’ The interview was tough and could be called a row for embellishment but to label Peterson as an anti-feminist is just wrong and has zero evidence to back it up.

The Sun also calls it a ‘row’ and calls Peterson a ‘controversial academic.’ He covered what makes him controversial in the interview.

Huffington Post states that Newman is threatened after the interview. It is miss leading because it is unclear what kind of threats are made, who is making them, and proof that the threats have actually been made.

The headline does not say allegations of threats, rather they just state it as fact.

The Guardian defends Peterson.

 

The Star simply reports that security has been bolstered.

 

One article analyzes the ‘abuse’ and finds it lack luster and worst against Peterson and his supporters.

 

The Mirror says that Peterson didn’t agree that the gender pay gap is unfair. This is very misleading because what Peterson took issue with was the degree to which sexism determines the pay gap as opposed to other factors such as women’s own interest.

Add Mirror:

 

The Copy and Paste Job

While reading these articles and writing my own I noticed a pattern. A few of the articles used the same phrases and I am not talking about using the same quotes.

Several articles call Peterson a Controversial Psychologist or Professor (The Star, Huffington Post, The Mirror). I first thought that they were just writing along similar lines because they were all writing about the same story.

That is until I came across this line from The Star “Peterson is best known for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns for transgender and non-binary people who request them.”

This line jumped out at me because it is misleading and untrue. I also had a suspicion that is had heard it somewhere else. A quick check of my notes showed that I had written down this quote from a Huffington Post article.

Not a similar quote, the exact same quote. I pulled the article back up and started rereading side by side with The Star article. They were the exact same. Not similar but word for word the exact same (below are screen shots of the text from each article side by side).

I do not know if this is just lazy journalism, two media outlets sharing the same article or a collaborative effort by two media companies to push the same narrative. Something tells me it is a bit of all three.

History Repeats

This is not the first time we have seem media outlets all run the same story from the same perspective, pushing toward the same goal with little or no regard for facts or evidence. We have seen this with President Trump over and over again.

It is also not the first time we have seen the Progressive’s push a narrative in an attempt to further their ideology that turns out to be a lie. The recent hijab cutting in Canada that elicited a response from their Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turned out to be a hoax just to name one.

This time they were pushing to smear Jordan Peterson because of his sound defeat of their ‘social justice’ view of the world, which divides everyone into victims or oppressors. They want to distract from one of the big truths revealed in this interview. That Freedom of Speech is a right and should be protected and the ‘right’ to not be offended is nothing more than a thin excuse for authoritarian control and censorship.