Ahem. Before we begin, a little mood music:
Ah, that was lovely.
But the glass we’re about to look into is empty, and what dregs we do find in it won’t be red. They’re white as flaky, flaky snow…and they come courtesy of someone who hung out in some pretty drecky intellectual company herself:
Lindsay Shepherd, the teaching assistant who rose to prominence after she was controversially disciplined for showing her class part of a TVOntario program on gender-neutral pronouns, is suing Wilfrid Laurier University, two professors, and a manager of the school’s Diversity and Equity Office.
She claims harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal. The “attacks” on her “have rendered her unemployable in academia,” she claims, and forced her to abandon her career plans for further graduate study and teaching.
The statement of claim, which seeks $3.6 million, was filed Tuesday in Waterloo, Ont., and as yet no statements of defence have been filed.
$3.6 fucking million? Girl, sit DOWN.
Nobody rendered you unemployable but yourself. You’re the one who made the shitty decision to play back Jordan Fucking Peterson’s dumb maunderings to your students. You’re the one who formed that widdle Freeze Peach club at WLU. You’re the one who invited those Nazis to speak on campus, and hung out in their company quite happily until a fire alarm got pulled.
You seriously believed you could get away with it, just because WLU initially did nothing to stop it. You no doubt thought that academic freedom meant freedom from the consequences of your actions.
And now that it’s all blown up in your face and you’ve been called to account for said actions, you’re whining that you’ve been “attacked”? And you expect to get rich off your own stupidity? Girl, BYE.
By now, this could be the plotline for a schlocky TV movie of the week: Stupid white person does stupid white thing; gets called out for it (frequently, but not exclusively, by non-white people); panics; whines that they’re being “attacked”; sues if possible; if suing not possible, sets up Patreon account and rakes in big bucks from other stupid, mostly white people who can’t tell the difference between accountability and harassment either. This shit is so predictable, you could almost tell time by it.
And of course, Lindsay Shepherd being a stupid white person, that plotline is exactly the trajectory she’s following.
Yes, she has at least one post-secondary degree. Yes, she did manage to wangle a slot as a teaching assistant. No, getting into post-secondary education and being a TA doesn’t mean you’re automatically and inherently immune to Teh Stoopid. Lots of stupid people even have doctorates; take Sebastian Fucking Gorka, for example (please!).
And Jordan Peterson, to whom she clearly harkens, is one such person. He’s been deemed, quite appropriately, to be “the stupid person’s smart person”, because he confirms the biases of idiots in a convoluted quasi-intellectual manner, with a high academic gloss that looks pretty bright if you’re not close enough to it to notice all the crazing and chipping, or just can’t be arsed to peel it all off and see what’s really underneath, as really smart people are wont to do.
And now Jordan Peterson, it seems, has convinced her that there’s big money to be made in playing the whiny white victim of a multicolored, multicultural lynch mob. After all, that gig is working out rather well for him at the moment.
The problem with trying to profit off of white whine, however, is that when you’ve thrown in your lot with Nazis, getting that stain off your skin is a lot harder than it looks. Right now, the so-called “alt-right” and its allies are having a moment. But that moment is passing quickly. And when it’s gone, what’s left but the taint?
So yeah, Linz, good luck with all that. You’re gonna need it. Ha, ha.
