Jordan Peterson: Trudeau and the equity tyrants must be stopped

We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world Author of the article: Jordan Peterson Published Sep 11, 2023  •  Last updated 2 days ago  •  9 minute read 1664 Comments

Some of those reading this column will know that I have been ordered by the Ontario College of Psychologists to undergo “social media re-training” of indeterminate length, as a consequence of expressing my opinions publicly, with the specified outcome of my comprehensive compliance, as judged by my re-educators.

The charges levied against me include re-tweeting a tweet by the Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada (are you listening, “conservatives”?), criticizing Justin Trudeau and a diverse number of his minions, and expressing skepticism about the doom-saying fear-mongering tyranny-promoting chicken-little prognostications of the eco-fascists.

Why should Canadians care? If you’re a miner, and the canary caged next to you asphyxiates, you don’t blame the bird for being there. You notice that the air has become toxic, and you make tracks for the surface. Regulated professionals, subject to the petty tyranny of their overseeing agencies, are now starting to gasp and choke. Them first — you, next.

It’s already true in Canada that lawyers cannot have the reasonable certainty they once had with regard to the outcome of the cases they are pursuing, relying as they once did on precedent and the common or even civil law. Instead, they have to be prepared to be subjected to the opinions of an increasingly activist court, whose members have taken it upon themselves to put forward what is essentially a radical leftist (“progressive”) agenda. It’s true that physicians and teachers are so afraid to say what they think that even the reasonable among them no longer dare to tell the truth to the patients and children they serve. How do I know this? Because they tell me so. And how well do Canadians presume that the professionals they need will serve them, when they have all been cowed into, at best, liars of silence?

And why should Canadians believe in the existence and operation of such an agenda, rather than (comfortingly) passing such suggestions off as the ranting of demented, conspiratorially-minded right wingers, such as myself?

Here are a couple of facts (remember those?) simultaneously indisputable and unpleasant: Our “Minister of the Environment and Climate Change,” Steven Guilbeault, was not only a radical leftist activist, in his previous incarnation, but is now simultaneously savaging the economy of Western Canada, upon whose revenue his home province of Quebec shamefully, ungratefully and resentfully depends upon, while he works directly with the Chinese Communist Party, rulers of a country building more coal plants every year (two a week) than the rest of the world combined; six times more, to be precise.

He is doing that while rumours of CCP influence over the Canadian electoral process abound (!), under the supervision of a prime minister who has explicitly expressed admiration for the efficiency of communist tyranny, who was a friend to the demented tyrant who ran Cuba as his private fiefdom for decades. That would be Fidel Castro, bosom buddy as well as to Trudeau senior, and the same man who told former president Jimmy Carter that he would have sacrificed his whole island paradise to nuclear annihilation by our American allies just to move the Soviet agenda forward.

He is doing that under the rainbow-festooned banner of a “Liberal” party that has moved so far to the left that the hapless socialist NDP has nothing whatsoever left to offer (particularly labouring as they do under Jagmeet Singh, the most hypocritical politician Canada has ever coughed onto dry land. He is an empty suit of designer clothes too incompetent even to have bargained for the cabinet seat that is the going price, on the world market, for a politician’s soul).

He is doing that as part of an administration that is an express supporter of the deadly doctrine of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity, the mask that the wolves of compassion wear while they open the throats of the idiot sheep who think they are supporting all that is good and true. Equity: there’s a basket of snakes. What does equity mean? The useful idiots of the moderate left insist that it’s just a synonym for “equality of opportunity.” Why the new word, then, thinkers on the liberal side?

Equity means something very particular, good Canadians. It means that all economic and social systems that do not produce precise equality of outcomes across all possible measures of human difference (race, ethnicity, sex, “gender,” age, health status, ability, you name it) are to be regarded as “systemically prejudiced” and utterly re-tooled, in a revolutionary manner. What’s wrong with that, you ask, thinking of the excluded and the “marginalized,” in that manner so sympathetic endlessly and conveniently deserving of praise; considering yourself, despite your lack of actual effort on their behalf, a friend of the poor.

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Let me ask you a straightforward question: do you own anything? A cell phone, perhaps; maybe a car; possibly even an apartment or house (although that is increasingly unlikely, particularly for young people, in Trudeau’s socialist paradise). Does that not mean that other people (the same marginalized; the same poor) don’t own that phone, that car, that house? Are you not therefore excluding them? The answer to that question, by the way, is “yes.” Of course you’re bloody well excluding them — oppressing them, marginalizing them, with your exclusive access to what you have hypothetically worked to earn.

“Property is theft”: no shortage of barely successful peasants such as yourself have died as a consequence of that cliché. How did societies get themselves to that point? By adopting the doctrine of equity, which is now deemed a mandatory belief by the professional organizations that regulate lawyers, physicians, psychologists, accountants, engineer and teachers (and that is not nearly all) in Canada.

Equity is no different than communism, boys and girls. Wait: let me clarify, as that is an error, but not in the direction you think. It’s far worse than mere communism. Marx had nothing on the post-modernists, who now occupy the universities, and have dramatically expanded upon his dread and murderous vision. Marx viewed oppression as essentially one-dimensional: the proletariat (that’s the poor for those of you who went through Canada’s “education” system and still don’t know even that) were exploited by the “bourgeoisie” (that turns out to be “anyone who owns anything at all”). That has happened forever; that’s all you really need to know about history and human social relationships in general; and it has to stop. By any means necessary.

Hence the hundred million or so deaths at the hands of the compassionate progressives in the 20th century. Of course, that wasn’t real communism.

You can tell, because some people were accidentally left standing.

For the postmodernists whose theories now dominate the academy and, increasingly, the western world, the bitter resentment of Marx was just the beginning. The concept of oppression is now limitlessly multi-dimensional. Everyone has become a victim, because of their height, their weight, their lack of attractiveness or athletic ability, their country of origin, their religious belief, the status of their ancestors.

What’s the problem with that? After all, life is hard, and much is distributed unfairly. Well, when everyone is a victim, everyone also becomes, perforce, an oppressor — and the punishment for that is severe. Maybe you’re a bit fat (victim, victim), but you’re white, or the tan that we now call brown that could become white in a flash. Presto! You’re a perpetrator. Maybe you don’t own a house (victim, victim). But you own a rusty old wreck from the 90s. Compared to those who can only afford a bicycle (perhaps because they’re useless layabouts) you are definitely an oppressor. Perhaps you’re genuinely poor (victim victim), but you’re young. You can be certain that you are then at least afflicted by implicit ageism, and your very youth a mark of at least your unconscious bias and general shameful reprehensibility.

Are you beginning to understand the game? I doubt it. It’s much easier for Canadians to keep their sheep/ostrich-heads firmly in the sand, and assume that anyone pointing out not so much what’s going on but what’s already happened is an extremist, a bigot, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a Confederate sympathizer (in Canada (!)), a MAGA Republican, hell-bent for God only knows what possible reason on overthrowing Canadian democracy.

As if they bloody well care.

As if they even know where Canada is.

Why am I fighting the college? Probably because I’m stupid, or at least, as a Canadian journalist so famously put it, “the stupid person’s smart person.” Touché. Seriously (although all educators are, perforce, the stupid people’s smart person). But I have plenty of money, and a wife I love, and a family that supports me, and friends that do as well, and the opportunity to live anywhere I want to in the world, and have been informed by those who run other political jurisdictions that they would restore my licence in a heart-beat if the low-level schemers in eternally good-thinking Ontario manage to purloin it, as they probably will. I really don’t need the hassle, to say nothing of the literally tens of thousands of dollars it costs per month to keep the vipers at bay.

The process is the punishment, as those who have successfully weaponized many such deep-state bureaucracies know full well.

I am doing it to bring to the attention of Canadians — and, if not Canadians, whose smug self-complacency is perhaps unparalleled in the world (except maybe in comparison to the Kiwis or the liberal Californians) — then to people elsewhere in the West, increasingly inclined as they are to see what is happening in Canada, just as intelligent miners see their canaries.

We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world. As Canada goes, so hope the progressives, the world goes. Thus, the good fight might as well be fought here. I have a son, a daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in this benighted country. My parents live here. My daughter departed for freer lands, and I won’t forgive the current administration for that. Her example is tempting, and I’ve lived in the United States before — but the same problem exists among our neighbours to the south, despite their more extensive commitment to the freedom that has vanished with amazing rapidity in the Great White North.

It is not that freedom of speech is threatened in Canada, by the way, good people. It’s that it’s already pretty much gone — although, God willing, not permanently. The same can be said for freedom of conscience and association. We gave up freedom of mobility under Trudeau, which was the only freedom he could directly threaten, in his attempt to (successfully) divide Canadians, and therefore promptly did.

We still have the freedom to pretend that everything is just as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. But it’s not. The fact that I am being persecuted for criticizing the prime minister, for passing on the opinions of Pierre Poilievre, and for doubting the opinions of that veritable traitor, Steven Guilbeault, is a primary indication of that. My case would not be attracting the international attention that it is — as is the prosecution of the Trucker Convoy leaders, whose protest was widely admired outside this country — if that was not the case.

Why should you care? It’s not about me, folks. I have options.

You don’t.

But I’m still inclined to fight.

How about you?