More from dear old Rex......
Rex Murphy: Jordan Peterson is the real hero in the Captain America comic book attack
Peterson's resistance against political correctness and cancel culture is one of the truly virtuous and courageous actions of our time
Author of the article:Rex Murphy
Publishing date:Apr 08, 2021
A portion of a panel from Captain America Volume 9 #28, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which shows the villain Red Skull lecturing viewers on his “10 rules for life.”
Jordan Peterson has had a hard time of it.
I’m not referring to his health, which I see as a personal matter best left to himself and his family, and not matter for outside commentary. I’d like that to be clear.
I wish instead to concentrate on his reception, here in Canada and outside of Canada. From the very first, when he issued his declaration that he would never submit to “compelled speech,” there has been a furious effort to drown him out, or to tag him with obnoxious labels, or to push the mute button on him through the now familiar and mean tactics of cancel culture.
His own university attempted to shut him up, sending not one but two letters to him of caution and implicit rebuke, and a knot of woke students chanted and ran a “noise machine” to try to physically shut him up.
There has been a furious effort to drown him out
Some of the more virulent attempts at labelling were assertions without factual foundation that he was “sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and make(s) light of rape.” And that string of pernicious adjectives was but the subhead of a full article with the wonderful explanatory title “Why does Jordan Peterson resonate with white supremacists?” Meaning, as others were fully explicit on this point, that Peterson himself was a white supremacist. No gutter accusation was out of bounds from the always virtuous and kind progressive zealots. Finally, there were no end of sophomoric and petty insults thrown at him by various intellectually vacuous, so-called columnists.
Why all this meanness and in some cases actual hatred for the man? The general answer is easily given. The alt-left (I feel justified in using this term as the progressive tribe continuously hurled alt-right at him) don’t like his ideas, and in that charmed circle, not liking certain ideas quickly translates into not liking the holder of them. A fuller answer is that Peterson, through a combination of his intelligence and to some degree the operations of chance, was hurled into international prominence and gained an audience of millions. He offered the fullest, most thought-out rebuttal to the very key, trendy and dogmatic positions of the hard left. These are the scourge of identity politics, environmentalism as a substitute religion, the pernicious notion of collective guilt, anti-white fulminations, and the repression of free speech that shelters under the ludicrous banners of “safe spaces” and the “speech is violence” mantra. To this litany of malefactions he added praise for, and recommended the currently outrageous idea of, personal responsibility.
In other words, Dr. Peterson, almost single-handedly, took on the whole woke sensibility and all its attendant onslaughts against common sense, its obsession with deploring the culture of the West, its serpentine entanglement with the arts curricula of most universities, and, ultimately, its quintessential preciousness. He shook the columns of the whole left-thinking temple. He was, consequently, one man at the centre of a hurricane.
His public success was another factor. Within his own caste, that of university professors, mere envy was enough to draw out a multitude of enemies. For a considerable sub-set of university professors the lure of public recognition is powerful. Members of this set would rather spend 10 minutes on some ill-watched and calamitously boring TV panel, or show up in a 30-second clip on any TV newscast, than receive a rain of honorary degrees for their actual work. They’d rather pundit than profess.
And here was this upstart professor of clinical psychology, in a flash metamorphosed into a world-famous lecturer, selling literally millions of his books, courted by the famous, and drawing huge audiences anywhere he chose to go. His success revved up all the great engines of envy that power the being of some in the ivory tower. He also scorned what a good half of the humanities are composed of these days, the nutritionless agit-prop that flags itself as “culture studies,” built on grievance more than scholarship.
How hard they tried, and try, to bring him down. A recent article venomously dragged personal reflections on his family into the vendetta. Naturally he has had deep support, not least and I think the most significantly from the audiences that gathered in their thousands to listen to his positive, uplifting, and — he is a professor let us remember — well-argued, dispassionate, analysis of current mentalities.
Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life and the recently published Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
But the hard swipes always gather more attention, and extreme expression of contempt for his ideas and his intelligence will cause great numbers to gape. So it is that — of all possible outlets, this is astonishing — Marvel Comics has had a malicious, petty and venomous go at him. Marvel Comics, the fantasy playground of perpetual adolescents, manna for the sub-literate, mental junk.
Seems author and culture warrior Ta-Nehisi Coates scripted — an adult wouldn’t want this known — the latest Captain America, and gave to the villainous Red Skull a slimly disguised and slimy version of some of Peterson’s teachings. Dr. Peterson responded to this contemptible puerility with “What in the world is this” and more tellingly I think with: “Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull?”
Answer: Yes you do. You also live in a universe where the smallest people go for the cheapest insults.
Political correctness and its guillotine blade, cancel culture, is the palsy of our days. There is no vaccine for this scourge, and there is no one looking for a vaccine. Peterson’s resistance against both is, in my view, one of the truly virtuous and courageous actions of our time. No wonder he is so viciously maligned.
National Post
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex...box=1617877174