IF YOU thought things couldn’t get worse after the false incrimination and public shaming of the Covington High School students; or you were hoping that, given the shamefaced apologies of some of the rush-to-judgment ‘righteous ones’, the dangers of modern prejudice had been learnt, then think again.

You don’t have to be an active Christian to fall foul of the judgmental and dictatorial Left. Being an independent or critical thinker will do and it’s a brave student who puts his head above the parapet.

Now it seems that for a student to quote from the likes of Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro (even Sam Clarke) is enough to risk penalisation and demonisation, as you can see from this story about a pair of bright Utah high school seniors.

In brief they were disqualified during a school debating contest for the crime of citing Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro and clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson. Their crime, the later comments of the tournament director suggest, was to have been insufficiently accommodating of their opponents’ and the judge’s prejudices. The good news is that they refused to be browbeaten. Instead they walked towards the fire.

You can view a full account and report of the incident here:

The debate they’d been invited to take part in was on immigration. Its nominal motion was a proposal to reduce restrictions on legal immigration. But instead of setting out their case for this, their opponents had chosen to perform a ‘slam’ poem, as an expression of defiance against the terms ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, leaving them nothing to debate, no argument to counter. For pointing out that this was unfair, insult was heaped on injury. They were told that they couldn’t comment on fairness because they were white males.

Undaunted, they proceeded to speed-read through quotes from Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson pertaining to their critique of identity politics, specifically citing a comment by Shapiro that: ‘Evil things are still evil even if I’m a white well-off religious man and good things are still good even if I’m a white well-off religious man . . . My identity has nothing to do with what is right or wrong.’

It didn’t go down well.

The judge ended the round after their quotes, accused the pair of turning the debate into one about identity politics, claimed Shapiro and Peterson were racists, and declared they had lost the round.

But, as well as being well on top of their identity politics, they also had the ‘nous’ to record the proceedings.

If this guy is the future, it is far from lost.