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Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

Remember Lindsay Shepherd, the Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant and student who was late last year brought in for a brainwashing by two of her superiors and a gender violence bureaucrat for having dared show a class an excerpt of a televised debate, starring Peterson, about those very pronouns.

Remember how few of Peterson’s fellow professors, and Shepherd’s contemporaries or teachers, spoke up in their respective defence, and how very many signed petitions condemning them.

None of that is scary. None of it is news. What it is, alas, is the status quo.

What was unsettling were the references, made by lawyer Marty Moore, who represents the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which has taken on the fight for the student groups, to the reasons given, either in meetings, email, affidavits or testimony in examination for discovery, by the student union reps.

A review of some of the documents in the case shows just how utterly ingrained are the hardened social justice views.

All three of the schools and the student unions, of course, have either bylaws or policies committing them to the fight for anti-oppression, decolonization, feminism and positive or safe spaces.

None of that is even up for discussion any longer; these are the givens.

At Durham/UOIT, for instance, one of the now-defunct student association’s statements of principle read as follows: “Its goal is to work toward building an environment free of systemic societal oppression and decolonization and to do all other things that are incidental or conducive to these purposes.”