Nonetheless, Peterson fights hard for their attention. During his lectures, he paces around the room, his voice fluctuating in tone and dynamic as he waxes theoretical on a string of elaborate hypotheses. He likes to sporadically lock eyes with individual students in the first few rows, approaching them swiftly and raising his voice to get his point across. In one moment he’s dissecting the philosophy of Carl Jung, and in the next he’s reciting the contents of a dream he had the previous night (an incoherent recollection about posing as a Vitruvian man when suddenly the room fills with snakes). “Your mind is a very strange space,” he once told his audience, mid-ramble. “The minute you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it’ll reconfigure the world within keeping that aim—that’s how you see to begin with.” Most of his students let the statement pass, immersed in their social media pursuits.

It isn’t until class wraps up that Peterson becomes the centre of attention. The 54-year-old packs up his belongings and navigates past the foot traffic toward a clear space in the outside corridor. Instantly, eight students line up to speak with him. A short, bearded man, no more than 21 years old—perhaps one of Peterson’s students, perhaps not—shakes his hand vigorously. “I just want you to know how much it means to me, what you’re doing,” the man says. Peterson nods, and wishes him well. A similar exchange transpires with the next three students in line, keeping Peterson in the hallway for the next 10 minutes. These are the Peterson followers, the devoted fans that have emerged on campus to support his ideas.

Earlier in the school year, he turned heads after publicly declaring he would never use gender-neutral pronouns. He rejected the notion of a non-binary gender spectrum, and openly criticized Bill C-16, a federal bill tabled in May 2016 that would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include discrimination on the basis of gender identity. He equated the requests of transgender and non-binary people to use pronouns other than “he” or “she” with the suppression of free speech, asserting that his refusal to use such pronouns could land him in hot water with human rights commissions. While many condemned Peterson’s controversial claims, he was simultaneously rewarded with a swath of devoted fans both in Canada and abroad—some of whom even show up in his weekly classes.

Mari Jang, a neuroscience and bioinformatics major at U of T, is one of them. She had only heard Peterson’s name in passing before he made headlines, but now she attends his Thursday lectures regularly. Jang finds Peterson to be a very compelling speaker. “You feel like you’re talking to a human being, and not some foreign entity standing up at the front of the classroom spitting out lecture material at you.”

Many of his fans would agree. Online, praise for Peterson’s speaking abilities seems endless. His YouTube videos receive tens of thousands of hits; more than 200,000 people were subscribed to his channel at the time of publication. Images of Peterson looking thoughtfully into the distance, accompanied by a quote of his in cursive text as though he’s Mahatma Gandhi, circulate regularly within right-wing online forums. An entire subsection of Reddit, a massive online forum, is dedicated solely to Peterson jokes.

Historically, university campuses have served as a space where authority is challenged and met with protest, often from a liberal vantage point. But Peterson has become something of a folk-hero for students opposing what they see as a status quo of liberal discourse on Canadian campuses. As “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and perceived identity politics play an increasing role in student politics—what an article on American university discourse in The Atlantic once referred to as the “coddling of the American mind”—room for discussion on sensitive subject matter is seen to have come under threat. Many students have sparked a movement that’s centred itself on the value of free speech—a fundamental right that Peterson and his fans alike say has been suppressed. In turn, campuses have become battlegrounds, pitting left-leaning students against their far-right counterparts and resulting in ugly spats that teeter on the edge of hatefulness.

***

In the mid-afternoon of October 11, 2016, a large group of students gather on the steps of Sidney Smith Hall, packing in front of the building against one another’s knapsacks. It’s just one week after the release of Peterson’s initial YouTube series, and a rally has broken out to defend Peterson’s controversial claims.

The gathering attracts both sides of the disagreement—the leftie students furious with the havoc Peterson supporters had unleashed, and the supporters themselves. Lauren Southern, a former commentator for right-wing news organization The Rebel Media, known for a stunt in which she received a doctor’s note stating she was male by pretending to identify as transgender, showed up. So did the Black Liberation Collective (BLC), fundamental dissenters of Peterson’s claims. Eventually even Peterson himself ventures outside Sid Smith, greeted by a mixture of jeers and applause. When he tries to speak to the crowd, he is drowned out by a white-noise machine that a counter-protester has hooked up to a speaker.

It’s not long before ad-hominen attacks and bursts of violence break out across the rally. A man wearing a Hells Angels jacket is isolated by police. Another man shouts, “We need more Michael Browns,” referring to a Black man shot and killed by police in Missouri in 2014, at the group of counter-protesters—suggesting more members of the Black community should be slain. A member of the trans and non-binary community smacks Southern’s microphone from her hands. By the end, a man claims to have been briefly strangled by another protester before campus police came to break it up.

In the aftermath of the heated protest, Jang decided to make a Facebook group to promote free speech on campus. She worried that many who opposed Peterson’s beliefs wanted to censor him entirely. For years, Jang worked as an interpreter for North Korean refugees, where she heard harrowing stories of the consequences the country’s laypeople would face should they say the wrong thing. Obviously, she said, Canada is nowhere near the dystopian reality of North Korea, but “one of my biggest fears is living in a world where freedom of speech is questioned.” Her experiences informed her need to defend free speech, and seeing Peterson’s willingness to defend his own motivated her to do the same.

A screenshot from the SFSS Facebook group.

Jang opened Students in Support of Free Speech (SSFS) to anyone who believed in Peterson’s right to speak his mind, whether they agreed with him or not. Almost instantly, the group gained hundreds of members. They consisted primarily of U of T students who gathered online to laud Peterson’s bravery, vigorously reminding each other of free speech’s intrinsic value in a democratic society. They praised Peterson for his brilliance and showed disdain for his dissenters—“radical leftists,” “social justice warriors,” and “the regressive left,” as they called them. (Peterson did not respond to requests for comment from This.)

The Peterson story embodied the clichéd narrative of the valiant professor fighting solo against an amorphous horde of radical, irrational college students with nose rings—and it quickly drew in students at other universities. At the University of British Columbia, the UBC Free Speech Club emerged, declaring their commitment “to cultivating an open dialogue on campus, where arguments are made with wit and reason rather than rhetoric and personal attack.” One day after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, about a dozen members of the club held a “coming-out party,” setting up a table outside the student commons and donning red “Make America Great Again” hats. Three hours south of UBC, the University of Victoria’s Students for Free Speech and Accountability came to fruition; within 24 hours of its inception, founders had to deny allegations that they were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations. The groups remain niche—neither tops more than 600 students at universities with undergraduate populations well over 10,000, and their gatherings primarily remain online.

The bulk of their discourse appears to situate them in opposition to “social justice warriors”—a derogatory term to describe those who lean left and are outspoken about issues of race, gender, and sexuality. They oppose what they see as identity politics, and—as testament to their widespread adoration for Peterson—they champion the need for public debate rather than polarized silence. For dissenters, that debate is often reviled as hateful.

And hateful it became. In the months following SSFS’ inception, dialogue among its members turned from the usual Peterson praising to a mixture of sexism, anti-Semitism, transphobia, and particularly rampant xenophobia. The group attracted not only U of T students but also Facebook users in rural America sporting Make America Great Again hats, in support of President Donald Trump, in their profile pictures and images of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated as a mascot for racist and sexist ideologies, as their cover photos. “Women are offended to know their place, which is to take care of children develop raise and hold families together,” wrote one member. “I present you with something whose threat to science is even more cancerous than creationism: postmodern feminism,” wrote another.

Nonetheless, the administrators held fast to their convictions—the members would not be banned, nor would their posts be removed. “There are many nasty things from both sides in the group, but that’s just a reflection of where our society has progressed,” SSFS vice-president Geoffrey Liew tells me over the phone. “This is a space where we can actually confront those different views instead of segregating them off into different spheres where people don’t come into contact with them.”

The group’s public relations officer, Chad Hallman, tells me he much prefers arguing with someone’s outlandish opinion rather than silencing it. “There are some pretty despicable views toward certain groups,” he says. “But when there is backlash [to those views], and people see how overwhelming [the backlash] is toward that individual spreading hate, that’s more reassuring than just deleting a post.”

The standards Hallman and his group uphold are not completely far-fetched in a larger educational context. The university has long been a site for the free exchange of ideas, and debate is encouraged among students, viewed as an opportunity to learn and grow intellectually. But as human rights commentator Steven Zhou notes, the university is also positioned as a microcosm of society at large—and when certain beliefs infiltrate campus, it’s a signal of changes to come outside of school boundaries. “The campus propaganda is a sign that this wave has reached an outer fringe of the right wing that’s looking to regain a certain kind of footing among the youth,” Zhou writes for CBC, referencing the widespread appearance of white nationalist posters on campuses across the country.

A screenshot from the SFSS Facebook group.

In early December, just two months after its inception, administrators abandoned the Facebook group, sensing that a U of T-only group would be more effective in defining the boundaries of discourse. The group quickly went the route of Holocaust denial. “Yall [sic] realize the six million number is bullshit? ” one member asked. “More Jewish propaganda trying to draw Goy sympathy.” Meanwhile, at the University of Calgary, the right-wing Wildrose Club on campus came under fire after circulating an email to its members reminding them that “feminism is cancer.” In the UBC Free Speech club Facebook group, one member asked that everyone please “keep the ad-hominen attacks to a minimum.”

***

In mid-November 2016, when it seems as though the Peterson controversy has hit its inevitable tipping point, the University of Toronto hosts a public debate on Bill C-16 between Peterson, U of T law professor and director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Brenda Cossman, and Mary Bryson, a professor of education at UBC. It is intended to bring the controversy’s opposing dialogues into contention. But by its end, everyone’s pre-established notions are only reaffirmed. Peterson calls human rights tribunals “kangaroo courts” that should be abolished as fast as possible. Cossman rebuts that all human rights are about is respect and dignity; if you can throw a bit of kindness on top, even better. Bryson says Peterson’s videos provide a fabulous case study in the cultural production of ignorance in an age of reactionary populism. Peterson adds that the “political-correctness police” have brainwashed everyone. There is little consensus.

But following the debate, Bryson, who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun they, received extensive online threats targeting their gender identity. “The best part about you being a dyke bitch, this shit dies with you, you fucking nasty subhuman piece of trash,” said one message, delivered through Facebook. In the comment section of an article by Christie Blatchford in the National Post, one person wrote: “Things like Bryson remind me of the repulsive, repugnant creatures Clint Eastwood had to deal with and eradicate in his Dirty Harry series.” (Bryson declined to speak to This for matters of safety.)

A Facebook message to Bryson following the debate.

Such instances of bigotry on campus are not confined to the Peterson controversy, but have rather expanded to form an uptick in discriminatory sentiment among many university students. “White Students Union” posters were discovered on York, Ryerson, and U of T campuses last fall, depicting two white men posing stoically in front of the CN Tower. The group responsible for the posters lists “organiz[ing] for and advanc[ing] the interests of Western peoples” as a mission statement online. Other posters reading “Fuck Your Turban” were found on the University of Alberta campus. Anti-Muslim and anti-gay graphics accompanied posters on McGill campus with “Make Canada Great Again” emblazoned as the headline.

When outgoing vice-president, university affairs of the U of T Students’ Union Cassandra Williams expressed anger over the swath of threats made toward Bryson, she was met with a distressing response. “If a trans person puts themselves out publicly, then they can’t expect to not experience violent harassment,” someone told her.

“I think that’s kind of what the culture is right now,” Williams says. “There’s an expectation that it is fair, or justified, or it’s ‘just the way things are,’ that a trans person, should they choose to speak out in defence of themselves in their community, should they choose to just be visible or have a high profile, is bringing that sort of harassment or violence upon themselves.”

If human rights commentator Zhou’s theory that the campus signals change for society at large is true, the treatment of Peterson dissenters like Williams is a troubling sign: It suggests a level of comfort to express such hateful ideology. “That some of the more extreme and explicit forms of this rhetoric are being found on campuses is alarming,” Zhou writes. “It’s a sign that whoever’s responsible is looking to young people for a response and to campuses as a possible setting for mobilization.”

Countering the values of Peterson and the SSFS administrators, Williams participated in #NotUpForDebate, a protest of the forum between Peterson, Bryson, and Cossman, on November 19. “Debating whether or not different classes of people are deserving of equal rights… has always been happening with marginalized groups,” Williams, who identifies as trans, explains. “By saying that these things are not up for debate, we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re here, and we’ve always been here,’ and just [by] virtue of being humans and by virtue of us being members of society, we have, automatically, the expectation of equal rights and the expectation of freedom from discrimination.”

SSFS public relations officer Hallman fervently disagrees with #NotUpForDebate: “If there was one thing that we could do to really de-escalate the general situation, it would be to bring it more toward the space of dialogue and discussion.”

***

In recent months, Peterson shifted the arena of his discourse from U of T to a number of other universities—receiving predictably mixed reception in turn. In mid-March, he stood outside a lecture hall at McMaster University, surrounded in equal part by admirers and protesters. It was a relatively warm day for the season, and the afternoon oxygen appeared to have effectively energized both sides of the campus debacle.

“Shut down Peterson,” chanted the protesters in unison, clanging on pots and pans as they worked to drown him out.

Peterson, red in the face and unwilling to back down from a fight, vociferously reprimanded them. “You, like it or not, only have the interests of your group,” he shouted back. “And the world is nothing but a battleground between groups of different interests!”

Video clips of Peterson’s rather unflattering altercation with the angry protestors would later circulate the Free Speech clubs’ Facebook groups.

“These leftists are some of the worst activists I’ve ever seen,” wrote one. “I really wish I was back in school to fight back against these degenerates,” wrote another.

The noise peaked. Peterson lost his train of thought. A woman in front of him appeared to ask a question, but his response was drowned out by the surrounding chaos.

Eventually, both sides went home.

All that being said, I’m now going to do that thing where I completely discount everything I wrote in the opening paragraph. That’s 30 seconds of your life you will never get back, and for that I sincerely, sincerely apologize.

Brian Pallister. Courtesy CBC.

This is leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba, Brian Pallister. You might remember him from the time in 2005 when he copped to “what’s known as a woman’s answer […] It’s a sort of fickle kind of thing.” When questioned about his dithering on future plans. He later apologized.

You may also remember the time Ol’ Brian “your pal” (imagined self-imposed nickname) Pallister, hilariously chided then CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint, Dave Dingwall, in the House of Commons with a delightfully clever, and by clever I mean incredibly lame, parody rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” He was responsible for these unforgettable lyrics:

“You don’t need no information,

we’re in charge of thought control,

fine wines with caviar in the backroom.”

And then his fellow Tories chimed in with:

“Hey Tories, leave those Grits alone

All in all, it’s just another ding in the wall”

That was also in 2005, a banner year for Pallister, and song parody enthusiasts the world over. Anyways, all of that aside Pallister again said something incredibly stupid and this time on camera! In the video below he wishes “infidel atheists” a happy holidays, and then paternalistically adds, “I don’t know what you celebrate during the holiday season, I myself celebrate the birth of Christ…If you wish to celebrate nothing and get together with friends that’s good too.”

The contents of what he is saying is not particularly offensive to me. As an atheist, I wasn’t really looking for Brian Pallister’s go-ahead to celebrate the holidays. What is offensive to me is the condescending “pat on the head” he is giving to a group of people who don’t believe what he believes. Also particularly galling, is the internal struggle you’re witnessing of a man who seems to want to rage against the increasingly secular nature of Christmas (As in: We can’t even say Merry Christmas anymore! What is the world coming to!?!?!), but knows he can’t because he’s a politician.

I recognize that this is just an ignorant person not really knowing how to mask their ignorance. He’s trying his darndest to get his stupid thoughts from his brain, where it makes perfect sense, to the rest of us without coming across as stupid. The problem is he doesn’t have enough skill or cunning to pull it off. And yes Brian, I too know that infidel means non-believer, so while you weren’t crossing any strict definition lines, you purposely used a charged word to intensify your argument in favour of good, clean, Christian celebration of the holidays. Really, though, it would be as awful as me calling someone a faggot homosexual and then earnestly arguing that faggot technically means a bundle of sticks. But I know it’s a charged word and so did you, so no amount of saying “I respect your choice, all the best” is going to deflect from the molotov cocktail you lobbed two sentences earlier.

From avoiceformen.com

Both a Voice for Men (AVfM) and its sidekick organization Men’s Rights Edmonton deserve a WTF post of their own. The hate groups aren’t so much about men’s rights, like the name might suggest (because cis white hetero males have no rights whatsoever), as they are about hating women. One line in the Men’s Rights Edmonton blog, for instance, says feminists have abortions because pregnancy is inconvenient, while another says feminists have children to steal from taxpayers. Also, women have sex to trick men into getting them pregnant—because only women have access to birth control. These are cold, hard, MRA “facts”—so easily dismissed, you may never have wasted time on its misogyny-fuelled web presence.

However, recently Men’s Rights Edmonton started posting AVfM hate speech all over town. In response to Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton’s (SAVE) three-year-old anti-rape campaign, called Don’t Be That Guy, AVfM made a similar styled rape-apologist, victim-blaming, slut-shaming campaign called, creatively, Don’t Be That Girl. The organization uses SAVE’s images, but with different slogans. Instead of the picture with a girl holding a drink and the caption, “Doesn’t mean she wants sex. Sex without consent = sexual assault,” the group has used, “Just because you regret a one night stand doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.”

Thankfully, those posters are now gone. In an e-mail, professor and the chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta Dr. Lise Gotell says she never saw the posters herself outside of social media, though she later learned they went up over the weekend of July 6. The University of Alberta Protective Services contacted her after someone spotted them on campus July 9. The posters were taken down around campus, as per University regulations.

AVfM seems to be shocked it is being brought to court for copyright infringement—even though that’s arguably what it did. A July 14 AVfM post reads, “On July 11th, A Voice for Men received an email from a law firm claiming to represent a noxious hate group in the Edmonton, Alberta area of Canada calling themselves Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton.”

If the group was really about human rights, like they claim, those behind it wouldn’t be so offended by the notion of a message saying, “Don’t rape women.” Their argument is that women lie about being raped more than they actually are—because, apparently, it is so great living as a rape victim. I think members also want to bring light to male rape victims but it is hard to figure out through both sites. All I really see in the messaging is: women are evil and ruining the world.

In a July 10 CBC News report on the campaign, false rape accusations were brought up: “Police officers who investigate sexual assault cases say false accusations are ‘extremely rare.’”

“’I was sexual assault detective for four and a half years and in that time I only dealt with one, and I dealt with numerous files. Many, many, many files,” acting Insp. Sean Armstrong from the serious crimes branch of Edmonton Police told CBC.

And yes, sincerely heartbreakingly, males do get raped. Statistics shared by the Rape Victims Support Network says one in four girls, and one in eight boys, are sexually abused by the age of eighteen. Instead of wasting efforts on creating rape apologies, though, the male rights groups’ energy could be better spent on campaigns urging males to report rape. Or looking into why people think male rape in prison is so funny when it is beyond terrible. There are issues that need the focus but sadly, MRA groups seem to prefer trolling feminist blogs, lumping all different feminist types together, and bashing them by making fun of women’s physical appearances, or their assumptions of such, like how we all wear army boots.

The reason there is so much focus on sexual assault against women is because, statistically, such things happen more often to them. Every 17 minutes a woman is raped in Canada. Out of every 17 Canadian women, one has been raped at least once in her lifetime; the most likely victims are 15–24 years old. The SAVE campaign did not demonize men; in fact it welcomed men into the discussion. It didn’t say males don’t get raped or that all men rape. AVfM showing a picture of a woman Nazi doesn’t prove anything. (Side note: why is Nazi even a colloquial term? A stickler for good grammar is in no way the same as the evil carried out by those monsters.)

A Men’s Right’s Edmonton blog post from June 29 says (in one giant sic), “Seems to me, if our message was so distorted, and our arguments so weak (as feminists continually say they are), feminists wouldn’t try so hard to make sure nobody even has a chance to see them. & by the way, ripping down our posters only broadcasts to the world your fear of our message, so we will happily continue putting more up.”

Ideally, the continuation of the posters will only serve to prove why few take the group’s  message seriously. However, as Dr. Gotell says, “I am most concerned about the integrity of the Don’t Be THAT Guy campaign and about how the altered posters may dissuade police reporting.”

Facebook is now applying regulations intolerant of gender-based hate speech.

On May 28, the company released a statement on how hard it is for it find a balance between freedom of speech and community respect. In the past, the social media site has faced similar situations regarding Jewish, Muslim, and LGBT communities. If something doesn’t fall under Favebook’s definition of hate speech, it is deemed offensive or controversial, but not necessary to take down. Such logic can become frustrating when a picture of a woman breastfeeding, posted to her own account, can be taken down but a meme making light of an abused preschool child remains to circulate on timelines.

Together, groups sent Facebook advertisers 5,000 e-mails. Magnum Ice Cream may not want to be associated with murdering pregnant women, and Dove may not fancy being in the vicinity of a message saying to break the fingers of a deaf, mute woman so that she can’t report being raped.

Some advertisers kept quiet, but Facebook promises not to. In its letter, the company says its evaluation process of material will be more thorough and will involve the consultation of women’s advocates, effective immediately. They say a test program was already in the works to make creators of offensive content include their authentic identity, which, it theorizes, will make them more accountable for their work.

Of course, there are outcries over the internet saying this is a violation of free speech, and that if something isn’t illegal in the United States it shouldn’t be banned. But with over a billion active monthly users, the folks at Facebook are smart to consider their entire audience. Just because something isn’t illegal, doesn’t make it ethical. Laws are made based on the times. Both legal and ethical codes need to keep up with social media being part of every day life in order to stay relevant and continually used.

Picture by Blake Emrys

When the Holocaust ended almost 70 years ago, and we said it would never happen again. Yet, there have been six genocides since then. The systematic murders in Darfur are ongoing, and the country’s government won’t address them. Many groups have been founded to tackle genocide in the past 15 years—such as United to End Genocide, Genocide Watch, and Genocide Prevention Program—all with the intent to halt any potential genocides.

And now, there’s a new genocide prevention group that’s been getting some well-deserved buzz. The Toronto-based NGO, Sentinel Project, uses its website and other technology to keep track of early warning signs of genocides. What makes it so revolutionary is its interactive hate-speech documenting website, Hatebase, that launched this past March.

The database is made up of slurs regarding ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class and gender, including information on what country and language they were said in. Anyone can sign up and input overheard name-calling in their area, or search the categorized lists. The point of all this is to discover any hate speech trends per area and address them before violence strikes. As outlined in the eight stages of genocide by Genocide Watch, mass murder begins with classification and symbolization. Classification is distinguishing “us from them” and symbolization is the name-calling we’re talking about here. The ultra-scary next step is dehumanization—denying that those they nickname are even human at all.

Scrolling through Hatebase lists, I’ve learned new words that will never cross my lips. However, I can unfortunately see some of this language easily added to other people’s repertoire. Just look at what happened to Urban Dictionary. What was once a website for teenage slang definitions has now been taken over by made-up (and often sexist) user-written slurs.

Twitter has had a sharp increase of  “hate-spewing hashtags and handles” this year, according to the annual report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a racism history museum. For further proof, visit the Alberta-based website No Homophobes. Any time the words “gay”, “faggot”, “dyke”, or “no homo” are posted on Twitter, it automatically pops up on the site. It even shows the stats. Last week, “faggot” was tweeted 395,087 times. The site urges us to consider how often we use hurtful language without thinking. It’s an effective, albeit depressing, reality check.

Hate speech at that stage does not a genocide make, but as those at Sentinel Project know all too well, this is where it can start. Offensive material can be reported on the social networking sites themselves. Every post and picture on Facebook carries with it an option to report it to an FB team who removes it. Where to report Twitter abuse is more or less hidden in the settings section. “Reporting” the instances of hate speech is what Hatebase does too. So where does it go from there?

First, it draws upon themes. Hatebase has noticed that those of the Baha’i religion in Iran are increasingly being shunned from society, for example. It also fears the apparent ethnic rivalry in Kenya could escalate into genocide. With this information, it can try to prevent attacks by “countering websites that incite hatred, using mobile phones networks to document abuses and warn threatened communities, and employing GPS technology to guide targeted people to safe areas.” The organization is not without limitations, as it lacks the tools to physically intervene, but it’s a start.

Referring back to the eight stages of genocide, the last stage is denial. After a genocide has taken place, the perpetrators always attempt to cover up any evidence. But Western denial could be labelled as one of the first steps of genocide. Countries with the power to stop ongoing genocides often don’t. As far as the Sentinel Project is concerned, if catching the warning signs can save a life, it’s worth it.

So our website bit the big one on Friday morning, which kind of cramped our plans for Legalization Week’s big finish. Everything seems to be working again, our apologies for the interruption. Without further ado, here it is, the call for legalization that I think might be the most controversial in the issue: Laura Kusisto writes that we should stop the prosecution of hate speech:

We protect religion and equality because we recognize that these freedoms make individuals’ lives better. But we protect expression because unfettered dissent is the only way to protect democracy. When a government official sits across from conservative blogger Ezra Levant in a 25-square-foot conference room and asks him to explain his decision to publish the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons, she is asking a single citizen to justify his political beliefs before the power of the state. Levant may be a blowhard, but that scenario should give everyone—left, right, whatever—serious pause.

…Which marks one of those exceedingly rare occasions when This Magazine finds itself on the same side of an argument as Ezra Levant — who, incidentally, being a good sport, has donated a copy of his book, Shakedown, which we’ll be raffling off at Thursday’s launch party for the issue.

Be sure to vote in our poll on the issue (see right) and have your say. And check out the whole “Legalize Everything” package of articles, which are now all online for your reading pleasure/rage/irritation/curiosity:

• Tim Falconer: Fix the health care system and end suffering — legalize suicide
• Jordan Heath Rawlings: Pay indie artists and break the music monopoly — legalize music piracy
• Katie Addleman: Crack down on organized crime and save addicts — legalize hard drugs
• Rosemary Counter: Support small farms and get tastier cheese — legalize raw milk
• Laura Kusisto: Strengthen democracy and fight bigotry head-on — legalize hate speech