Edmonton Pride cancelled by cancel culture 

I’m the daughter of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. I’ve also made a name for myself by promoting an all-meat diet (The Lion Diet) for the last two years. This diet, I believe, healed my medically-uncontrollable autoimmune disease. Hence, I know a thing or two about trolls. Trolls are a bipartisan problem, and we need to know how to deal with them.

It started with my dad when he went viral in 2016 due to his stance on preferred pronouns (Bill C16 in Canada). His principled stance led international notoriety and fame. It was the left that first came after him. The onslaught was an attempt to put him in a box—who was Jordan Peterson? We’ve had the terms alt-right, male-chauvinist, free speech warrior, an anti-trans rights conservative thrown around a lot. Some even compared him to Hitler. None of that was remotely accurate—he just thinks people’s lives would be improved if they told the truth. Most manifestations were online, but some were quite real—we’ve had posters put up around our neighbourhood with a “warning” sign and his face on them. 

I wouldn’t call the people who did this trolls. While they were certainly out to harm his reputation, their key driver was fear. They were also devoid of a sense of humour. 

Trolls use humour, or most of them do. There are funny ones who tease, ones that make memes, satirical trolls (see Titania McGrath), those who push boundaries, but there are also trolls who see someone struggling and take that opportunity to add in a bit more suffering. There are trolls who are really just damaged individuals, and instead of taking that hurt and thinking, “I’ve experienced pain and the world would be a better place if there was less of that,” they think, “I’ve experienced pain and that wasn’t fair, so everyone else should suffer as I did.”

The left is interesting insofar as they claim to discourage bullying, but there are many vicious bullies among them. My father was attacked without an ounce of humour, initially. After the left had their fill, there was backlash from the right when they realized he didn’t really fit into their box, either. Some just poked fun at my dad—particularly with memes which we quite enjoyed. But there were also those who psychopathically hid behind their keyboards and looked for any sign of weakness to exploit, just because they were bored. 

The internet has had a field day with my story, and how could it not? “Single Mother—Daughter of the Custodian of the Patriarchy—Touts An All Meat Diet To Cure Disease.” There couldn’t be an easier target. I had a vegan YouTuber send his 300k+ vegans after me at the same time as a former U.S. comedian with a large (legitimately) alt-right audience, sent his. The barrage of malice and ridicule was overwhelming. I reached a point where I couldn’t laugh it off anymore. 

Then someone published a book about my diet claiming to be Jordan and I. It was listed in the Toxicology section of Amazon. Definitely a troll, somewhat annoying, but at least it was a little funny, and brought my sense of humour back. I bought one of the books just to have around. That all happened in a two week period, at the same time as my Dad entered rehab (at least partly due to the stress of being attacked from all angles for the last three years). This is what a well-permeated troll culture can achieve.

So how did we get here? Well, a couple of things have led to this troll culture we live in. The first was the uniting power of the internet. Most people are fairly agreeable, or society wouldn’t function. Disagreeable people (mostly men), being a statistical minority, have a hard time getting along with others, and trolling in real life can have very immediate consequences. However, if you say something provocative online, it’s from behind a screen so there really isn’t much danger. You venture out to different corners of the internet, trolling, until you find your little group with relatively few repercussions. It’s these communities of disagreeable, rather malicious individuals that can self-organize towards attacking a particular person or idea. 

The far left has—and still is—trying to shut down our ability to tease each other, and joke in real life. One of the reasons teasing is fun is because it is provocative—a safe means for pushing boundaries. However, the logic of the far left resembles something like “if something is provocative, then it is mean, and if it is mean, it needs to be stopped.”

There’s no nuance. Comedians are getting censored, for God’s sake. Comedians. They’re professional jokers and they’re getting censored. What type of message does that send? That you don’t know have a right to judge what is offensive or non-offensive anymore? For example, I was part of a Facebook group where someone demanded a trigger warning before talking about renovations, just in case someone couldn’t afford to do the same renovations. And they were dead serious. How could a disagreeable person, especially one with a support group not attack that? Hell, I couldn’t even help it, and I was a pregnant woman at the time. 

I believe that by striving for tolerance and conformity, the left both bred new trolls and made them much more influential by removing real-world competition. When trolling first started it would have been a few disagreeable individuals, but now anyone with a sense of humour can be considered a troll. Since society can’t handle comedians anymore, we now have trolls to poke fun at us and see how far we can be pushed. Some are funny. Some push too far, but, is it because they are, perhaps, getting pushed themselves? At least partly.

This is what happens when people aren’t allowed to tease each other, and discussions are literally banned. Combine that with digital impunity and a loyal fan club for the most vicious trolls… What do we expect? We can’t really fight back. And you know what? That’s okay. Just like a comedian is defined by the response of his or her audience, so is the influence of a troll defined by the attention they can stir up.

So I’ll end with a few suggestions coming from years of experience dealing with trolls.

1. Do not engage. They will say anything to get a response. Ignore them. There’s no winning against someone trying to make the world a worse place.
2. Laugh it off. Try and see the humour in it. Instead of taking offence. Our culture is more and more devoid of poking fun at stressful situations and we should be trying to increase that wherever we can. How else do you deal with the brutality of life? Humour is key. Even if that’s making fun of my family and my ridiculous diet.  
3. Support free speech in real life. If we want to limit trolling on the internet, we should make trolling more acceptable in the real world. The more free speech is shut down, the more comedians are censored, and the more disagreeable people are silenced, the stronger this troll culture will get.

Try not to take yourself too seriously. And have a steak.

A popular parody account has been suspended from Twitter following outrage by one of the largest media outlets in the world. The man behind Shaniqua O’Tool, an account that had over 15,000 followers at the time of suspension, says The Guardian forced Twitter to censor comedy.

He spoke to The Post Millennial to reveal details on the campaign waged by The Guardian against his satirical tweets. While his identity is known to The Post Millennial, it is being withheld for reasons of privacy.

Starting as a Godfrey Elfwick-styled account, the account owner says the Shaniqua O’Tool character was meant to “poke fun at both the far-left and the far-right.” He says the name was inspired by the 2003 single “Shaniqua don’t live here no more” by Little T and One Track Mike.

The account’s owner points out the existence of a Twitter account dedicated to compiling the Guardian’s most meme-able headlines, including one where Guardian columnist Abi Wilkinson suggests the “tears of joy emoji” mocks human suffering. 

“Some of [The Guardian’s] headlines bordered on insanity, so I felt it was worthy of satire.” He says. In 2017, he began posting edited Guardian headlines with Shaniqua’s face photoshopped in as the columnist. 

Some of Shaniqua’s antics were so indiscernible from authentic Guardian headlines that they attracted the attention of outraged media outlets. Gateway Pundit wrote an article decrying Shaniqua as an “ISIS sympathizer” for her headline on police needing to learn the importance of spotting a “fake suicide vest” before shooting. The Gateway Pundit article, which claimed to have read the non-existent Shaniqua column, was quickly deleted.

“I mocked [Gateway Pundit] for it,” the account owner says, “and when my headlines caught conservative commentator Katie Hopkins off guard, I mocked her for it too.” He says, asserting that his satire was bipartisan. However, he notes that there was a difference in how people of different political orientations handled being the target of his comedy.

“It is a consistent and recurring pattern over the last few years that if you poke fun at conservative or right-leaning people, they tend to just go with the joke or ignore you. If you poke fun at left-wing people, my experience is very different. They report you, verbally attack you, mobilize their followers to report and block, and ensure your name is added as a ‘Nazi’ to block lists.”

On November 29th, 2019, the account received a copyright strike notice from Twitter. The claim was apparently filed by Guardian editor Tom Stevens, who wrote that Shaniqua’s infringement was “pretending to be a Guardian writer. The tweets are fake and offensive.”

The claims were made through Twitter’s copyright system, which is intended to protect the rightful owners of intellectual property. Prior to completing a claim within this system, a complainant must acknowledge that they considered “Fair Use” laws, and accept responsibility for damages in the event they misrepresented fair use material as infringement.

Fair Use is a provision which states that copyrighted work can be utilized if the use is sufficiently transformative. According to the University of Minnesota, transformative content uses original work in a “completely new or unexpected way,” and lists parody as being the clearest example of “transformative content.”

In the case of Shaniqua, the account was not utilizing anything more than the template of Guardian headlines. The headlines themselves, lede, and photo were original.

In 2017, Buzzfeed called Twitter’s copyright system “hair-trigger,” and stated that “a copyright violation from a major media company is the surest way to lose access to one’s account.”

The Guardian filed two subsequent copyright claims on December 2nd, and the account was suspended the same day. In the claim, Guardian editor Tom Stevens writes “Becoming a serious problem now. Please take appropriate action.”

After the news of the Guardian‘s apparent campaign against Shaniqua surfaced, Twitter users began posting their own parodies of Guardian headlines using the hashtag #trollingtheguardian

Prior to getting suspended, the man behind Shaniqua attempted to open dialogue with Guardian media editor Jim Waterson, but his direct messages were not returned.

“He never replied, presumably, because he knew my days on Twitter were numbered.”

While appeals on copyright strikes are possible, the account owner says he was discouraged from doing so as it would mean providing consent for Twitter to share his personal information with The Guardian. Fearing harassment or a lawsuit, he did not appeal.

“It’s clear they don’t like being mocked,” he says, “I was followed en mass by Guardian journalists [the day of my suspension]. Being followed suddenly like that was deeply unnerving. It felt like they were letting me know they were watching me.”

The account owner has filed an appeal with Twitter over the account’s suspension but has not heard back as of publication. 

The Post Millennial reached out to The Guardian but has not heard back by the time of publication.  

Do social justice warriors have an ounce of humour left? The list of things we are allowed to talk or joke about seems to shrink every day. The latest in a long line of offence-riddled rants by activists in the outrage industry was cooked up by Shailja Patel, a real-life Titania McGrath (yes, she’s even won a slam poetry competition), who posted a tweet which started off a twitterstorm two days ago: 

“Today in white male solipsism. From the school of ‘women comedians are terrible’ and ‘non-white literatures are terrible’ and ‘hip-hop is terrible’ and ‘anything that doesn’t cater to me and reinforce my conviction that I am the center of the universe is terrible.’ We who?”

The tweet was a response to Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom), who again had responded to another tweet by Jon Becker:

What followed was Patel’s indignation at how someone dared say they found Indian food terrible. 

“(Nichols) trips over himself with eagerness to spew racist bullshit in the name of “I’m going to say something controversial tee hee.” Then chortles at the clapback: “People are tOuChY.” Why, yes, centuries of colonial slaughter, plunder, and mass starvation tend to have that effect.” She proceeded to talk about the 1943 Bengal famine, stating Winston Churchill had said Indians bred like rabbits. She said: “I guess @RadioFreeTom has never worked in a restaurant where he had to serve racist yobs all night, and be thankful for if they just insulted him, instead of killing him.”

Other presumed historical wrongs were also mentioned:  anecdotes about children, presumably of Indian descent, living in the West, throwing away their mothers’ curries for fear they would be ridiculed by their peers, or Indian students in the West walking for miles in harsh winter weather to find vegetarian food, dressed in unsuitable clothes. The list goes on. Nichols was then accused of othering, bullying, and “punching down in the crudest and ugliest way.” 

Really? Daring to state your opinion on a nation’s cuisine is “fuelling harassment” of “every South Asian call center worker, service industry or retail worker, cultural worker, student, (and) child on the playground”? As we’ve become accustomed to, in this brave new world of everything being racist, the tiniest micro-aggression can inflict the greatest of offence. Instead of tackling real issues of actual discrimination—of which there are many, even in India—Social Justice Warriors prefer to brew storms in teacups. Saira Rao weighed in too. A Democrat politician, long-time race-baiter, (or, as she calls herself, “racial justice activist,”) and co-founder of “Race 2 Dinner” (where white women “willing to set aside their white woman tears” are invited to dine with women of colour in order to be confronted with their racism), tweeted:

“Having white people trash Indian food is extremely triggering as an Indian who has been told that I smell weird, that my food smells weird and that Indians shit on the street which is why everything we are smells bad. My whole life.”

Her tweet has 72,000 likes at the time of writing, but to say that the Twittersphere was awash with only support for the aggrieved ladies I would be lying. The real Titania McGrath poked fun at the whole debacle:

“Any white man who doesn’t like Indian food is a genocidal racist. Any white man who likes Indian food is guilty of cultural appropriation and is no better than Hitler. Take your pick.”

And with that, she (or Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind Titania) nailed it. This is really what we’re being told now. This is Critical Race Theory in action. White supremacy means we’re all complicit in a system of structural racism, and there’s no way out, according to the believers. Even your food preferences are signs of white supremacy. Nuance and humour are dead, and you have to pick sides.

Speaking of Hitler, Rao is outspoken on her hate of Israel. She’s called all Jewish Israelis “combatants,” accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and called UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson a “notorious racist.” This is the height of far-left, woke activism: denouncing everything white people do and say, while also hating Jews, and claiming all people of colour are helpless victims and need protection from insensitive remarks about their cuisine. Her world view is so black-and-white that anyone who veers from her script is outright evil. Five-year-olds are frankly better at arguing their case than she is. 

Of course, saying you don’t like someone’s food is not especially polite. It’s what we teach our children not to do. Hardly anyone would insult someone’s food at a dinner party, but as adults we’re still allowed our preferences.  If you tell me you think Norwegian food is bland on Twitter, I couldn’t care less, although I am Norwegian. You’re probably partially right. Jamie Oliver, the British chef, is famous in Norway for mocking our goat’s cheese—a sweet, fudge-like brown cheese made from whey—when he visited the country back in 2008.

I think most Norwegians forgave him without throwing a tantrum saying he was the product of his ancestors’ colonialist past or something in that vein, but then this was before identity politics took hold and we all got along, more or less. It was simply brushed off as a bit impolite. And so it should be. Someone’s opinion of a type of food shouldn’t be noteworthy. Tom Nichols’ opinion on curries should not outrage anyone. He’s a professor of national security affairs and author with 287,000 followers on Twitter, not because he dislikes Indian food, but because of his academic merits.

In Britain, we love Indian food, but someone not liking it doesn’t need to be clamped down on from so-called anti-racist activists . Chicken Tikka Masala, once hailed the UK’s favourite dish, was recently beaten into the number two spot by another curry,  the creamier Chicken Korma. I doubt Indians, in the UK or in other places, care whether a man on the internet thinks Indian food is terrible. I might cook a curry tonight.

While our culture obsesses over manufactured identity-based crisis after crisis, I say there’s a real crisis of value—we need to see it and understand it.

It’s a kind of crisis not seen by others but felt only to deeply by the person trying to figure it out. We’re told our value comes from an imaginary ranking system that consists of how we identify, in the amount of followers we have or how well we fit into a protected group. These lies have distorted our sense of value not only in how we see ourselves but our ability to see others as well. 

The beast that runs society, social justice, has distorted the value of humanity. And so, a restoration of equality and individualism, an acknowledgement that my value is equal to yours because we’re both human.

Every person on this planet possesses unconditional value. It’s that simple. We can discover our own value through faith. Jesus was the greatest equalizer. Who else spent time with lepers, the outcast and the rulers of the day, yet placed them all on the same scale of equality? Imagine the state of our world if everyone did that!

Unconditional value is instilled into each individual the moment they are conceived; that’s a pretty big deal when you think about it. In the eyes of God, every person is equal, no matter how “bad” or “good” society perceives them of being. Religious or not, there’s a lesson to be learned here.

The removal of Judeo-Christian values from our society has produced a state of confusion. It’s interesting to watch people place others on a value scale. Usually, their conclusions are determined on someone’s social media, degree of victimhood, or professional status. But what we’ve created is an ecosystem to figure out where we lie on the scale that we created. Why? Because we want to figure out a way to feel just as valuable as those that we place value in. 

Society has rendered humanity less significant than at any point in western history. Today’s religion is all about debasement. Humans being described as a plague, is not only disturbing but devastating. The root of these types of views stems from a denial that men and women were created in God’s image.  

Still don’t believe me? Well, here’s some more food for thought, how does one explain the highest rates of suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety ever recorded? These issues have plagued my generation.

By focusing on identity groups, we undervalue a person’s worth. Fighting for “justice” and “equality” when we still do not see each other the right way will only lead to a vicious cycle of cancel culture and shaming. Whenever you distort the original form of a foundational element, you destroy the beauty of everything that is built upon it.

So where do we start? How do we develop a culture that isn’t so fixated on identity? We start in our own lives, we start to value those closest to us—genuinely. Through this lens, we no longer root causes in an issue’s superficialities but from a source of truth. That truth is an understanding that God instilled in us the same worth as he placed within kings and beggars. When we see our value as genuine regardless of position or the things we hold as status symbols, we start to see, act and treat others differently.

Your value isn’t found in another’s words or the level at which you perform but rooted in the God that made you. He made you for purpose, for a reason and he decided that you, of all people, would bare a uniqueness this planet has never seen before. True identity isn’t achieved through the demeaning of others or being part of a special group that strokes your ego, but the understanding that we all bleed the same and each one of us were given the same amount of value as the other, no more, no less. 

Our culture is currently backwards. We don’t need to “find our identity” first, we need to understand our value first, take personal responsibility, and then do unto others as you would have them do unto you.