Where Peterson may have first found the “compelled speech” phrase before his criticism of Bill C-16

Literallyanscombe
4 min readFeb 21, 2019

So in my campaigns of monitoring the growth of Petersonianity and its rhetoric on top of researching C-16, I found that Peterson’s invocation of Common Law and “compelled speech” happen to be used by conservatives on social media quite a lot lately to provide an instant defense for almost any opposition to socially conservative issue. When cornered, they can allege a feeling of compulsion, they consider their speech to have been violated, and thus any anti-discrimination laws to have used to victimize them (this is especially potent for C-16, which as I’ve pointed out many times contains no material on speech whatsoever). (My favourite scenario of this defense was a Twitter user confidently informing me that C-16 presented a “limitation on free speech unprecedented in the history of Common Law” apparently quite unaware of the whole medieval period as well as any history before the 19th century.) Even during the Senate debates while discussing C-16, Senator Lillian Eva Dyck noted how the phrase in this context seemed quite calculated as a wedge strategy to promote socially conservative legal causes without justification beyond personal feeling. Brenda Cossman who debated Peterson immediately in the fallout of his first video, recently pointed out how the right and far right are slowly transitioning their rhetoric about many issues of social conservatism to issues of “free speech” in one way or another beyond actual speech. I do predict that like “a republic not a democracy” flippancy we will be seeing this argument for a long time in the future, no matter how thoroughly it is discredited.

I thought it might be worth looking up with Google’s search tools when the phrase was first used, as I had not heard of it before Peterson’s early criticism of C-16. Before 2016 Google only returned search results focusing on American Jurisprudence and large employers compelling their employees to voice opinions they did not agree with. However early in the year 2016 the phrase began being used as Apple’s legal defense against being obligated to unlock devices for American law enforcement. Then suddenly something else popped up.

In June 2016, a Cato scholar named Josh Blackman wrote a piece for the Washington Post about how New York’s State’s Gender Identity rights legislation which does mandate the use of neo-pronouns in certain cases is a case of “compelled speech” especially in the case of non-binary or agendered identities. The Koch Brothers’ Cato institute had previously written about the Apple defense and its wider applications so it is very likely the term was in the air around the office. So basically, a year before Jordan Peterson, the Cato institute was promoting the idea that compelled speech could be applied to socially conservative issues as a wedge issue. Peterson has quite openly associated himself with other Koch-backed enterprises (which may well simply align with his existing far-right libertarian politics) as well as explicitly endorsing Stephen Hicks and several Objectivist organizations. If I am correct, it really looks like Peterson picked up the issue from the editorial (or the more sprawling and confused form on Blackman’s blog which Peterson tweeted in December of 2016), and applied it to C-16 once he heard it would be discussed in Parliament. Lacking any content dealing with pronouns (and some trans legal analysts pointing out that the whole structure of Civil Rights in Canada can only be used to enforce what are well-known social norms making inclusion of pronouns in Canada a non-starter without existing case law), Peterson supplemented the bill with legislation from a different jurisdiction (which constitutionally cannot conflict with each other following Section 92 of the Canadian Constitution), the Ontario Human Rights Code (which itself is “undecided” about whether pronouns can be enforceable recognition of identity). I also found out recently in a podcast that despite their names being closely linked, Peterson came to his conclusions on C-16 before Jared Brown rather than the other way around. In fact, Brown explicitly says at ~10:33 that his account was mostly based on Peterson’s first video, and he believed Peterson “understood the law better” than Human Rights lawyers.

There are two things I should make clear with pointing this connection out. This is not hard evidence that Peterson used the editorial at all, and Peterson is notoriously murky about his sources (if he hints at them at all) being unclear, and his account of his own arguments gradually degrading over time. I can’t find any specific passages that echo Peterson’s statements, and don’t feel like going through the original video to do so especially considering how sloppy and repetitive it was in the first place. The second point is that pointing to Koch think tanks does not abrogate any of us from the responsibility to demonstrate why this term is manipulative and sloppy. What I hope to do is remove the mystique of Peterson’s rhetoric to properly interrogate his positions as part of a larger set of libertarian anti-rights tendencies and rhetoric. The Cato institute may have money on some of Peterson’s activities like the PragerU videos, but their outlets have also criticized some of Peterson’s rhetoric as being excessively unclear and possibly sophistical. Peterson himself admits in the conclusion of Maps of Meaning that he is not sure what insights he has chanced upon, but that he considers them to be new and valuable (in all fairness, Wittgenstein says something very similar in *On Certainty*).

This is a call to studying his work closer and looking for larger trends and errors rather than to lazily dismiss it unconsidered. As with my piece on Common Law, there is real history and good news for civil rights to be uncovered in the process. As I said earlier, I believe Peterson’s rhetoric is damaging, and will likely be with us longer than Peterson’s own public notoriety.

*Blackman has also made many hour-long Youtube videos both for his own channel and the channel of the Federalist Society in the States. I refuse to analyze any more long Youtube videos by reactionary men than I have to.

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Literallyanscombe

Critical responses to anti-immigration movements, HBD, new atheism, and now Jordan Peterson and the IDW. I take out the trash nobody else wants to touch.