Never Go Full Cathy Newman

I think Jordan Peterson must have legally changed his name to Jordan Peterson, Hero of the Alt-Right.

At least that’s how every article about him begins.

These days, people can’t disagree without having some sort of agenda assigned to the disagreement. If someone disagrees with a black person, it must mean they are a racist. It must be personal. If someone, like Dr. Peterson, makes a persuasive argument against politically correct, postmodern progressivism, he must be doing it because he is a alt-right incel extremist who hates women.

This is nuts. While more subdued, the print media has gone full Cathy Newman on him – actually, that Cathy Newman approach is used against the right all the time.

“So you say you want lower taxes? Well, lower taxes mean less money for the state to give to the poor. Lots of black people are poor, so I guess what you are really saying is that you hate black people and want to starve them. You are a racist.”

Charles Krauthammer provided some valuable insight in a column he wrote a few years ago in a column titled, The Last Refuge of a Liberal :

“Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.”

I can disagree with you on the merits of the proposition regardless of your skin color, gender, sexual orientation or economic status. I don’t have to hate you to think you are wrong any more that thinking you are right means I have to love you.

This is what happens when everything is politicized, because politics. The word “politics” literally means the “affairs of state” (originally from “polis” or the “affairs of cities”) – when the state is placed at the center of life instead of the individual, it gives license for people to concern themselves in the lives of others to the point of interference.

While theory holds that laws apply equally to everybody, any time a law is affected upon a population the EFFECT on everyone is different – this is especially true when the objective of the law is some social engineering objective and it is when the state tries, through unequal application/enforcement of the laws, to make the EFFECT equal, it creates inequality and division. When people see they are being treated differently, it becomes personal and when it becomes personal, emotion rather than reason rules.

That’s where we are today.

There is only one answer. Get the state out of social matters. Resist the urge to say, “There ought to be a law!” for every situation. Stop thinking legislation and regulation is the answer to every problem.

Never go full Cathy Newman.