Who is this man, this Jordan Peterson, academic clinical psychologist, tenured at the University of Toronto with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, who has made a splash recently as a voice of reason, battling the political correctness elites and upsetting the academic grandees?
Less than a week ago, we got a stormy weather alert in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “What’s So Dangerous about Jordan Peterson?” by Tom Bartlett, with the tease “Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he leads a flock of die-hard disciples.” One might suppose, considering Mr. Bartlett’s choice of words, that Peterson is a Jim Jones-style cult-leader, but instinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education.
Mr. Bartlett considers Dr. Peterson a threat because Peterson deviates from the leftist academic canon – a conservative, traditionalist, moralist anti-political correctness psychologist academic. He objects to the speech police and the tyranny of the left. He that a totalitarian-speech police state is developing in Canada, and, by instinct and conviction, he objects strongly to the “good speech” laws demanding the use of concocted or inapposite pronouns and labels preferred by the little darlin’s of the newly concocted gender-identity claxon, cowbell, and tin drum army.
Peterson objects to speech police tactics, and he does it eloquently. That’s a threat to and dangerous for the academic poobahs who live and breathe censorship and intellectual tyranny. Bartlett’s essay is an alert: watch out for this conservative who has a bad attitude on lots of things and opposes our new pronoun gender identity group project and our promotion of the grievance status of the newly formed sex-gender-dysmorphist deviant group.
