A Young Woman You Should Know About

Thirty years ago the last place people would've thought free speech was imperilled was North American universities, yet today the pressure on students to conform to politically correct speech codes in some schools is enormous.

Consider the story of a young grad student named Lindsay Shepherd who attended Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada:

On November 1, 2017, during a first-year undergraduate class Shepherd was teaching, she showed two clips from a public Canadian television channel. The first featured [University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson], who has been an outspoken opponent of Canadian laws that mandate the use of transgender pronouns.

A heated discussion among the students followed the videos. Later, a student approached an LGBTQ support group, which then filed a complaint with the university’s Diversity and Equity Office. That office requested a meeting with Shepherd on November 8.

Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting, which turned into an interrogation. During the 40-minute circus, university staff (who acknowledged her “positionality” regarding open inquiry), accused her of having created a “toxic climate for some of the students” by playing the clips and approaching the topic neutrally (emphasis mine).

One professor even compared the pronoun debate to discussing whether a student of color should have rights. He also called Peterson a member of the “alt-right” and compared playing a clip featuring Peterson to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.” Peterson’s perspective was also rejected as “not valid,” as, apparently, not all perspectives are up for debate.

Shepherd released the recording to Canadian media. Not long afterward, WLU’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, apologized, as did Nathan Rambukkana, a professor and Shepherd’s academic advisor, who was the main antagonist in the meeting. MacLatchy said the meeting did not “reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires.”

Shepherd filed a lawsuit in June 2018 against the university, Rambukkana, and several others, for damages of $3.6 million, claiming “harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal.” Peterson also filed a lawsuit against Laurier and several university staff.

It's incredible that adopting a "neutral" standpoint on a controversial issue would get an instructor into trouble with her administration in an institution which is putatively committed to free and open inquiry.

It's also ironic because Shepherd considered herself, until this episode, to be a leftist progressive who supports environmental causes and gay marriage. Since then, however, she has published a video on her website which she titles "Goodbye to the Left" in which she explains why she no longer considers herself a leftist although she still retains the same position on many of the social issues she did previously.

The left, however, is so rife with censorship, victimhood culture and moral righteousness that she no longer feels a part of it. Her video has received almost a million views. You can read more about Shepherd at the link as well as get links to her video and youtube channel.

Her story is a common one. Liberals who value free speech and the free flow of ideas are finding themselves hounded, intimidated and driven from their jobs and careers by an intolerant, Stalinist left that brooks no challenge to, questioning of nor deviation from its dogmas.

The left is fond of purging from its midst anyone who sits just the slightest bit to their right, but by eliminating everyone situated to the right of the progressive mainstream they ensure that the mainstream continually moves leftward toward fascism, communism or some other tyrannical totalitarianism.

The left - not just the extremists in Antifa but also those who populate our college and university faculties and administrations as well as many in the upper echelons of the Democratic party - is a very real threat to the freedoms we take for granted as Americans, freedoms that are today under the greatest assault of any time in our nation's history.

Lindsay Shepherd and many others are unfortunately having to discover this the hard way. Google, for instance, the stories of liberals like Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, Evergreen College biology professor Brett Weinstein or Google software engineer James Damore to see how liberals who have the temerity to express heterodox opinions are harrassed and even have their careers ruined by the progressive brown shirts.

It's our future unless people who value our traditional freedoms stand up to the bullies and stop voting into office those who are the bullies' political enablers.