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Poor Steve Ladurantaye.

I hesitate to speak in his defence only because as a fellow sinner (I too engaged in the “Appropriation Prize” joke on Twitter), my support may do him more harm.

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But someone has to speak up: The managing editor at CBC’s The National, Ladurantaye is the third high-profile media type in recent months to resign or be demoted for expressing an idea offensive to the rigid current orthodoxy.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychology professor who knows a thing or two about taking on sacred cows, said Thursday in a brief phone conversation, that’s scary.

“You guys are being knocked off one by one,” he said. “Journalists better start fighting or they’re going to die.”

There’s a fourth figure too, less well-known until all this blew up — Hal Niedzviecki, the former editor of Write, The Writers’ Union of Canada quarterly.

He resigned after he was raked on social media for writing that writers should be free to write anything, in any voice, and having jokingly suggested an “Appropriation Prize” for the writer who best wrote outside her own experience.