People tend to keep living after being canceled. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they do not- sometimes they even thrive. Here are their stories.

 

Lindsay Shepard

Lindsay Shepherd joins the Justice Centre as Campus Free Speech ...

“Crime”: Showing a Jordan Peterson video in a college classroom without sufficiently criticizing it.

Attempted Cancellation: While assistant teaching a Wilford Laurier undergraduate class in November 2017, Ms. Shepard showed two clips regarding gender pronouns. Both involved Prof. Jordan Peterson- the first highlighting his arguments against the compelled use of gender pronouns, the second highlighting his opponent’s arguments for it. A complaint about the clips made its way to the Diversity and Equity Office, and less than a week later, Ms. Shepherd’s supervisor Nathan Rambukkana asked her to attend a meeting with several other administrators. During the meeting, Ms. Shepard was never shown the complaint or who made it, but was accused of creating a “toxic climate for some of the students”, asserted that the compelled use of gender pronouns was “not something intellectually neutral that is up for debate”, and likened showing a clip of Peterson to showing a clip of Hitler or Mao. They concluded by accusing Ms. Shepard of breaking the Canadian Human Rights Code, then demanding she submit her lesson plan to Mr. Rambukkana prior to each class for him for approval before using it. The importance of this event was Wilford Laurier’s administrator’s intention to intimidate Ms. Sheperd into obeying their ideological beliefs to a T from that point forward, and that is almost certainly what they expected.

Response to Attempted Cancellation: Since Ms. Sheperd recorded the meeting, she responded by sending it to several press outlets, causing uproar in Canadian news and beyond. She had many media appearances, including Louder with Crowder, The Rubin Report, and the Jordan Peterson Podcast. With a certain degree of Internet fame, she continued to champion free speech and academic freedom, even giving speeches on the topic for Ideacity, receiving an award from Heterodox Academy, and speaking at their conference. During this time, she also became engaged and had her first child in April 2019. After being a stay at home mom for a while, she is now an Investigative Journalism Fellow with True North News in Canada and has 80k followers on both Twitter and Youtube.