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The problem is, it was meant to happen quietly, crushing heresy noiselessly and invisibly. But after meeting Jordan Peterson once, and reading his commentaries, I feel confident in assuring you he won’t back down. (Especially as he has over 2,500 Patreon supporters backing him to the tune of over $28,000 a month to ensure that he can fight back and weather the storm.) And now that it’s become a story, it’s very hard for the powers that be to climb down especially because they can’t admit they were up.

The problem is, it was meant to happen quietly, crushing heresy noiselessly and invisibly

It especially galls me that the left, having seized the commanding heights of culture including academia, should not merely quash diversity but blithely deny doing so. Peterson is so obviously being made an example of. Can’t they person up and admit it?

To be fair, to some extent they are genuinely clueless. It’s like the federal Liberals expelling all their senators from their caucus then having a government “representative” rather than “leader” pushing their agenda through, and creating a “non-partisan” appointment process that miraculously puts like-minded people on the selection committee who put reliably like-minded people in the Senate (and if you defend residential schools even partially, you’re off the committee). You couldn’t do it without blushing if it was the product of cunning not snobbery.

Remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s jibe that liberals are always talking about other points of view but are always amazed to find there are other points of view? The idea that an intelligent, respected scholar might dissent from modern gender orthodoxy may have been so remote from their minds that they could smugly burn Peterson’s grant application and blow the ashes in his face and not realize anybody would notice or object.

Clearly one does not fund such persons. One does not know any. They live in trailer parks, don’t bathe, read the Bible and can’t spell. Yuck.

What if one doesn’t? What if the seamless, painless mechanism of excluding dissenting voices from academia is too crude, hasty and obvious? To fix it means admitting it happened. And that invites questions about why and how.

To their astonishment. But surely not ours.