Jordan Peterson, Penguin Publishing House and the art of being easily offended

Lassie Come-Home was the last book that made me cry. I was six years old when my mother first read it to me. When Lassie had to be sold, I am told I wept like a baby. Dogs. Truly man’s best friend.

Fast forward thirty-odd years and we now find ourselves in world where you only have to announce a new book and grown men and women burst into tears of offence. I am talking about the staff at Penguin Random House, who, when it was announced that the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson was releasing his new book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, spiralled into an apoplectic rage. The self-help guru’s latest book comes three years after his worldwide bestseller 12 Rules for Life.

According to Vice, a small cadre of enraged employees convened at a “townhall” meeting where they confronted management to discuss their concerns over the decision to publish the book by the Canadian hate monger.

One Twitter user reported: “several employees cried at the meeting discussing how Peterson’s views have negatively impacted their lives. One told me: ‘He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy…I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him.’”

Why does this man inspire so much vitriol? Peterson shot to fame a few years ago over his refusal to accept the Canadian Bill known as C-16. He simply refused to call a trans woman a woman, arguing in a nutshell that it was “compelled speech”, and as such, a violation of his right to free speech. That’s it. But in our clownish world, that’s all it takes to be cast out of society. Since then he has been loathed by the progressive left and dismissed as a pariah.

This is not the first time a publishing house has been the centre of a battle over the issue of gender identity. In June of this year, Hachette faced an “internal war” when several staff refused to work on the production of JK Rowling’s book The Ickabog due to the authors views on the transgender issue. But for this, and many other relatively innocuous statements on the issue she has faced the ire of a legion of online keyboard warriors telling her she should “Sit Down and Shut the F*** Up For The Rest of Time You Transphobic Bitch” Whilst others went for the even more direct:  #RIPJKRowling.

It has become somewhat of a staple of 21st century life that convictions of hate-crime are generously handed out on the internet. Those brave enough to speak up, prepare to be cancelled, or at the very least, face a baying online army of haters that will swarm like locusts on Twitter, and force you to close down your social media account. Ask the activists, academics and journalists like Posie Parker, Selina Todd and Julie Bindel who have all faced the wrath of the trans Twitter lobby for having the audacity to question the dominant gender identity narrative.

This week, the journalist Suzanne Moore has been at the receiving end of this ridiculous outrage. She is someone who I never thought I would be defending, but free-speech means defending those you don’t normally agree with.  She wrote a piece for The Guardian on trans issues and argued that it’s absurd to claim that sex is a social construct. The result? 338 of her “colleagues” [her emphasis] sent a collective letter of complaint to the editor, Kath Viner, which led to Moore’s resignation.

Imagine working in creative industries like writing and journalism and having the audacity to believe you can simply shut down someone else’s opinion because you don’t like it? As with the Jordan Peterson example, if opinions that run contrary to your own ideology offend you, then I don’t think journalism or publishing are the right career paths for you. To paraphrase Peterson himself in his now infamous Cathy Newman interview, we all risk offending each other as we search for the truth.

Editors and publishers must refuse to genuflect to the latest politically correct view. They must stand up to the internet activists and the perpetually offended serial complainers. We have seen campaigns to cancel authors and writers, ban books and censor what’s become “offensive”.  If the creative industries continue to pander to this small but increasingly vocal outraged minority, amplified by social media virtual signallers, I genuinely fear for the loss of one of our most basic, cherished liberties: free speech.