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This drove Dyson to, as was said of O.J. Simpson’s trial lawyer (Johnnie Cochran), “play the race card and deal it off the bottom of the deck,” accusing Peterson of being “mad, mean, bad, and white,” which the accused described as “a hell of a thing to say about someone in a debate.” The home audience rallied to him — it was an outrageous allegation and I was proud of the quality of his Canadian intellect and the fair-mindedness of the Canadian audience. Peterson also slapped away racial slurs such as indifference to native people by pointing out that he was brought up in a native area and was an honorary tribe-member, and when tauntingly asked to say where he thought “the extreme right went too far,” he replied: “What about Auschwitz?” Dyson and Goldberg both showed the frequently encountered American obliviousness to the fact that the United Sates and the world are not coextensive and the same thing.

Photo by Jason Franson/CP

The Peterson-Fry duo proved a powerful coalition of talents. After Peterson’s intellectual infantry overran the trenches of the New York and Washington left, Mr. Fry overflew the battlefield and carpet-bombed the retreating enemy with witty diplomacy. He was, he said, the antithesis of what his opponents were warring against: a man of the moderate left, a man so unwaveringly gay that when he emerged from within his mother “I said to myself I will never enter that sort of passage again,” and a person who has had “mental health issues.” Having made himself unassailable to his opponents, and almost irresistible by his good-natured and very intelligent light touch, he made a plea for decency, civility, the avoidance of name-calling and the collective imputation of discreditable characteristics to total strangers. It was a compelling double-barrelled response, victory in war and victory in peace. The audience was polled on the way in and then again at the end, and the political correctness skeptics won initially and their lead was stretched out somewhat at the end.