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On April 5, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas kicked off a new round of debate on the right way to regulate social media companies with a thoughtful and creative piece of legal scholarship. His key point is that First Amendment review by the courts might very well uphold a state or federal statute that treated social media platforms as common carriers or places of public accommodation and restricted their ability to remove content on their systems based on political point of view. He did this in the form of a non-binding concurring opinion in the Supreme Court decision dismissing as moot a lawsuit against former president Donald Trump over his blocking of some Twitter followers.

Justice Thomas is keyed into much of the ferment among conservatives who feel that tech companies are biased against their perspective. They point to the deplatforming of President Trump in January, following the Capitol Hill riot by his supporters, as a paradigmatic case of political discrimination against the conservative point of view. A proposed Texas law would respond to this perceived bias by treating social media companies as akin to common carriers and prohibiting deplatforming based on viewpoint.

Justice Thomas has, in effect, provided a response to a First Amendment challenge to such a common carriage law. In doing so, he joins critics from the left in stepping outside the libertarian paradigm that gives private companies the unfettered right to decide what is said on the media platforms they operate. He goes to the opposite extreme and says that social media companies should not be treated as speakers at all for First Amendment purposes. Rather, like telephone companies, they should be reconceptualized as neutral, passive conveyors of the speech of others.

This conception of social media companies as common carriers with no or severely restricted speech rights corresponds to the way they present themselves to the world as platforms for others to speak. It also reflects our intuitive understanding of what we are doing when we use social media platforms. When we post something on a social media platform, we are speaking, not the platform, just as when we make a telephone call we are speaking, not the telephone company. Thomas takes these business facts and entrenched social norms and turns them into the legal doctrine of common carriage.

In this conception, a state or federal law that treated social media companies as common carriers and prevented them from removing accounts on political grounds would not infringe on the companies First Amendment rights because, as common carriers, they do not have their own speech rights. It is the speech rights of the users that are paramount. The platforms are there merely as enablers of the speech of others.

As precedent Justice Thomas cites the Turner Broadcasting case that required cable operators to carry broadcast signals. He notes that the key passage in that decision [I]t stands to reason that if Congress may demand that telephone companies operate as common carriers, it can ask the same of cable operators might apply also to digital platforms.

The response from conservatives was positive, despite the opinions departure from the libertarian orthodoxy on the First Amendment. The conservative outlet, the Daily Wire, for instance, quoted extensively and approvingly from the opinion. Economist Marshall Auerbach writing in the conservative American Compass welcomed Justice Thomass refusal to require a showing of market power before designating social media as common carriers and praised his promising function-centric approach.

Of course, It is not just conservatives who are concerned with social media censorship. The suspicion of the power of private tech companies to control speech on their systems is broadly shared among progressives. For instance, a leader of the progressive left, Senator Bernie Sanders, was unnerved by the bans on former President Trump, wondering when the handful of high-tech people who control social media platforms might target somebody else who has a very different point of view.

Some on the progressive left have also endorse the idea of treating social media as common carriers. On the Law and Political Economy blog, law professors Genevieve Lakier and Nelson Tebbe argue that users have a constitutional right to carriage on social media that is needed to counteract the threats to freedom of speech that result from private control of the mass public sphere. Lakier also posted a series of favorable tweets on the Thomas opinion.

We are seeing a growing convergence of left and right on identifying private sector domination of the digital information space as the key problem. Both groups are seeking reforms to curb this power and are engaging in new thinking about the First Amendment to defend these reforms. Their watchwords are fairness, nondiscrimination, political neutrality, access and carriage rights.

This emerging coalition of reform forces recalls the 1980s fight to codify the Fairness Doctrine that pitted a coalition of left and right led by Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly against broadcasters and pro-business deregulators. Then-President Ronald Reagans antigovernment instincts prevailed over his conservative instincts and he vetoed the bill, thereby sustaining the decision by the Federal Communications Commission to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.

But common carrier regulation might not be the right way to go. In a response to Lakier and Tebbe on the Law and Political Economy blog, the renown First Amendment scholar Robert Post is right to note that treating social media companies as common carriers means that they would be compelled to broadcast intolerable and oppressive forms of speech. It might thereby invalidate even the minimal content moderation policies that these social media platforms currently deploy and exacerbate the problem of atrocious communication in the digital public sphere.

Post also notes that Congress cannot remedy this problem through content regulation of social media companies because the atrocious communication in the digital public sphere is protected speech; harmful perhaps, but legal. In our system, we largely rely on the private sector, not the government, to set the boundaries of acceptable speech. If social media companies cannot do this because they are treated as common carriers, then nothing is to stop them from becoming cesspools of pornography, hate speech, white supremacist propaganda and disinformation campaigns, all of which are constitutionally protected under current First Amendment jurisprudence.

There is another way forward, however. Common carrier regulation is not the only alternative to unfettered editorial freedom. Broadcasters are not common carriers, but they have some public interest responsibilities that prevent them from exercising full editorial control over their systems. At one time this included the Fairness Doctrine, but their public interest duties still require them to provide candidates with equal time and to provide reasonable amounts of educational and informational programs for children, to name just two examples. Enforcement by the Federal Communications Commission was and is flexible, showing great deference to the editorial judgment of the broadcasters themselves and intervening only when that judgment is so extreme that no reasonable person could agree with it.

A conception of the public interest responsibilities of social media companies needs to be developed, debated and discussed, and eventually legislated. One idea is that it is not access rights or non-discrimination among speakers that is needed for social media, but a fair representation of the views of the community. Our lodestar might be the principle recommended by free speech theorist Alexander Meiklejohn What is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.

Once those public interest duties are satisfied through an adequate and equitable distribution of community points of view, social media companies should be allowed to exercise editorial control over their systems. This would allow them to take the steps necessary to keep their systems free of harmful but legal material, just as broadcasters used their control of the airwaves to set their own boundaries of acceptable speech. This approach would create a middle ground between common carriage and unfettered freedom, where the editorial discretion of the social media companies would be broad enough to allow them to filter content, but not so broad that they can engage in viewpoint censorship of disfavored community perspectives.

Adapting these principles to social media would not be easy and will involve some hard thinking about technology. What should be done about amplification? Does a regulatory framework have to distinguish organic popularity from promotion by the platform itself? As a first approximation, the goal might be that the salience of the views on a platform should reflect their actual prevalence in the community, not the judgment of the platform of what should be popular or interesting or what would garner the most engagement for advertising purposes.

A regulatory structure would be needed to supervise such an arrangement and care must be taken to design it to prevent partisan bias of the regulator from corrupting the agency mission. The details will be messy and complicated but the time to start the hard work of constructing a balanced regulatory framework for social media is now.

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Justice Thomas sends a message on social media regulation - Brookings Institution

Mark Sherman, Associated Press Published 10:52 a.m. MT April 13, 2021

WASHINGTON Gerardo Serrano ticked off the border crossing agents by taking some photos on his phone. So they took his pickup truck and held onto it for more than two years.

Only after Serrano filed a federal lawsuit did he get back his Ford F-250. Now he wants the Supreme Court to step in and require a prompt court hearing as a matter of constitutional fairness whenever federal officials take someone's property under civil forfeiture law.

The justices could consider his case when they meet privately on Friday.

It's a corner of the larger forfeiture issue, when federal, state or local officials take someone's property, without ever having to prove that it has been used for illicit purposes.

This undated image provided by the Institute for Justice shows Gerardo Serrano outside the Supreme Court building in Washington. CBP agents seized Serrano's Ford F-250 and held it for more than two years.(Photo: APInstitute for Justice via AP)

Since 2000, governments have acquired at least $68.8 billion in forfeited property, according to the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that represents Serrano and tracks seizures. The group says the number "drastically underestimates forfeiture's true scope" because not all states provide data.

Serrano's troubles stemmed from some pictures he took along the way of a long trip from his home in Tyner, Kentucky, to visit relatives, including a dying aunt, in Zaragosa, Mexico. The photo-taking attracted the attention of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Eagle Pass, Texas.

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When Serrano refused to hand over the password to his phone, the agents went through the 2014 silver pickup truck in great detail. They justified its seizure by saying they found "munitions of war" inside five forgotten bullets, though no gun.

Serrano, 62, initially took a gun, for which he has a permit, but a Mexican cousin warned him not to bring it into Mexico. He ditched the weapon, but forgot about the few bullets the agents eventually found.

A one-time Republican candidate for Congress, Serrano recalled being surprised at his treatment at the border in September 2015.

"I deleted the photos, but I'm not giving you my phone," Serrano said.

Told to park the truck, he said, he complained a bit before one agent reached into the pickup, opened the door, unfastened Serrano's seat belt and yanked him out of the vehicle.

"I got rights, I got constitutional rights and he snaps back at me, 'You don't have no rights here. I'm sick and tired of hearing about your rights.' That took me aback," Serrano said.

He was handcuffed and held for several hours, refusing to unlock the phone or answer any questions. Eventually, he was told he could go, but without his truck.

"I said, 'How am I going to get home?' There's this smirk I can't forget. 'We don't care how you get home,'" Serrano said.

He left the border station on foot, called a relative who lived nearby and hung around the area for several weeks, hoping to reclaim the pickup truck. Serrano finally rented a car and returned home. He continued to make $673 monthly payments on the seized truck.

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Serrano might get some support from at least one justice. While an appeals court judge in New York, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion requiring New York City to hold prompt hearings when police seized cars. "It is this intermediate deprivation, lasting months or sometimes years without any prompt hearing before a neutral fact-finder, that we deem constitutionally infirm," Sotomayor wrote in 2002.

The Supreme Court took up the issue of whether governments must hold a reasonably quick hearing following a seizure once before, in a case from Chicago in 2009. But the court dismissed the case because the seized vehicles all had been returned by the time the case was argued.

In this undated image provided by the Institute for Justice, Gerardo Serrano holds a photo of his pickup that was held by the U.S. government for more than two years after a seizure at the border in Eagle Pass, Texas.(Photo: Institute for Justice via AP)

The Biden administration is urging the court to reject the case, saying there was nothing wrong with the initial seizure of the pickup and arguing that Serrano's claims ended when the vehicle was returned to him.

But Serrano's lawyers contend that the court should confront the issue because otherwise governments will continue to hold property for long periods and return it only to evade a judge's review.

"The rampant due process violations associated with modern civil forfeiture warrant review," they said in a high-court filing.

Serrano did get to see his aunt on the 2015 trip. Cousins drove across the border and took him to her. "When I went back home, three days later they called me and said she died," he said.

Opinion guest column: What can the US government do to respond to the border surge?: Andrew Selee and Andrea Tanco

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Truck seized at Texas border over 'munitions of war,' 5 forgotten bullets - El Paso Times

In just a few years, Jordan Peterson has risen from little-known psychology professor at the University of Toronto to pop cultural icon and bestselling author, boasting millions of followers and just as many haters. His book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which claimed the masculine spirit is under assault and espoused basic tenets such as clean up your room and get your house in order, became a sensation in 2018, particularly among young men who flocked to hear his lectures worldwide.

In an age dominated by political correctness, Peterson has taken contrarian stances on topics such as white privilege, the gender pay gap, and the enforced use of gender-neutral pronouns. Hes been deified as an intellectual superhero by his fans and demonized as an alt-right villain by the left. Just this week, it emerged that the progressive writer Ta-Nehisi Coates may have used Peterson as the inspiration for Nazi supervillain Red Skull in his new Captain America comic book. (Peterson called the likeness smears and urged his followers to buy a limited edition poster featuring Red Skull paired with something I actually said and added that 100 percent of the proceeds would go to charity.)

His latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, weaves together a diverse range of ideas, including from Nietzsche, the Bible and Harry Potter, and was an instant No. 1 New York Times bestseller when it came out last month.

And yet, in the past year, Peterson has faced one of the biggest trials of his own life. After his wife Tammy was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer, he was prescribed sedatives to calm his anxiety, only to find himself dependent and experiencing the horrifying side effect known as akathisia, which causes an inability to stop moving along with a sense of doom, panic and suicidal thoughts.

Peterson disappeared for a year as he went to Russia, then Serbia, for treatment. (The Sunday Times wrongly claimed he had schizophrenia.) Last summer, he returned to his regular self on his daughter Mikhailas podcast, where he was welcomed back by millions of fans.

A couple of weeks ago, I met with Peterson, 58, for almost three hours on Zoom, where he appeared in top form, speaking about ideology, our modern culture, spirituality and his own continuous struggle with mental illness. What follows is an edited and abridged Q&A from that session ...

Many people on the left have critiqued your re-emergence and new book release as fraudulent and hypocritical given the degradation of your own life. How do you respond to the criticism?

Yes, right. Believe me, Ive tortured myself about that plenty and constantly ... I was very apprehensive about writing this book or certainly about releasing it ... But everyone is susceptible to [being] cut off at the knees at any moment ... You can protect yourself against that, to some degree, by putting your life in order, and by living properly, but that doesnt mean that youre fully protected from it. We all die, we all get sick. If we cant communicate with anyone who doesnt get sick or die, then we cant communicate with anyone. Does that mean ... that we have nothing to offer? No, it means were also radically imperfect, that we should be careful, but were stuck with our inadequacies. I have my inadequacies.

A healthy dose of self-criticism is a common theme in your work. Have you come to realize any bad decisions you may have made which exacerbated your illness?

Yes, Ive looked at my contribution to it ... I took benzodiazepines, and that seems to have been ill-advised. Im very sensitive to benzodiazepine withdrawal. When I took them, I was really sick. I was insomniac for a long time, weeks, three weeks, I was freezing, I couldnt get enough clothes on. My blood pressure was so low I couldnt stand up. I was in absolute terror. I have no idea what happened. Then I went to the doctor and was prescribed this medication. I slept, and I felt better. I didnt think much of it. My life was very stressful at that point. That turned out to be a very bad decision. I wasnt aware of how dangerous this could be for some people.

Im curious how your suffering shaped your outlook on life and human existence.

The last chapter of my new book is be grateful in spite of your suffering. Its the right thing to do, to be grateful. Im not claiming this for myself. Its tightly allied with a kind of existential courage. Its a decision.

Im bitter, Im angry, Im resentful. (But) thats all victimhood. Its not helpful.

If you fall prey to resentment, and anger, and hostility, not even however rationalized, but however justified ... its not helpful.

Many, many days in the last two years, I truly believed that I would die before the end of the day. I just couldnt see how I could possibly be that impaired and live. It turns out youre a lot tougher than you even want to be sometimes ... Youre not that easy to kill.

One of the things one can do in a time of great hardship is to adapt a victimhood mindset. How have you dealt with the temptation to wallow in victimhood?

Im bitter, Im angry, Im resentful, all of those things. I shake my fist at God. Whats the justice in this? Trying to scour my conscience to see what Ive done wrong. Thats all victim. Thats all victimhood, but its not helpful. Im doing my best to drop that ... None of the victim responses have been productive for me. Ive tried to fight them off.

Why is victimhood status so attractive in our culture right now?

The first part of it is people dont necessarily regard themselves as victims. The activist types, they tend to regard themselves as spokespeople for the victims. They see an altruistic ethical motivation in that and regard it as admirable. To some degree, it is ... but those are important constraints ...

First of all, what makes you think that youre a spokesperson for the oppressed? What makes you think that you have that right? Why should anyone take you seriously? How do you know youve got the message right? Why do you think you have the solution at hand? How do you know youre not more dangerous than the problem itself? How do you know that your dark and unexamined motivations arent blinding you? ...

If you can just be a good person because you believe the right three things, how convenient is that? ...

You dont have to look at yourself and you have an enemy. Thats the part that scares me the most ... Now you have an enemy and that enemy is the cause of everything you hate. Now you have all moral justification to go after them, to hurt them, to stop them because theyre evil, and to elevate yourself morally as a consequence.

You have this unearned pathway to moral superiority thats actually dependent on your willingness to unfairly persecute based on your ignorance. Its terrible. Universities promote this, Well, you should be an activist. Thats essentially what every 19-year-old is taught. Its like, no, you shouldnt be an activist. You should get your own house in order, and then you should cautiously proceed to more difficult things if you dare.

Victimhood culture is most pronounced along the racial dimension. This is why perceptions like white privilege and oppressed minorities are so popular.

This is something that really bothers me about the radical left, you get your privilege, and you get to be morally superior because youre standing up for the victim. Its like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time.

Its terribly socially divisive and its unbelievably hypocritical.

Anybody who stands up and says, Im a professor, the system that produced me was so racist or was so prejudiced that its racist, you just admitted [that] you have no moral claim to your position. Resign now.

If ... the system that produced you say, as a professor, is so systemically prejudiced, you dont have a valid claim. Youre actually an incompetent fraud.

We say that culture has no capacity for forgiveness. Yet, people have forgiven me. Im amazed.

Why do you think people in positions of influence are so quick to call our society as oppressive and bigoted when our society is one of the most free, liberal, open-minded, inclusive societies that has ever existed?

A lot of its ignorance. People dont know, for example, that up until 1880, 95 percent of the Western world lived below todays UN-established poverty line. We have no idea how much dramatic improvement has been made in the last 150 years and how absolutely godawful things were before that. We dont know that because weve never been hungry, for example, not for one day.

You look around and you see, well, things could be better, so theyre bad ... Well, bad compared to what? Certainly bad compared to a hypothetical ideal, but not bad compared to all extent historical comparisons.

Why is religion increasingly unpopular in society, particularly among the young?

Lets say youre an ideologue, and youve decided that the patriarchy needs to be smashed. What do you do? You go to protests. Thats smoke and fire. Its dramatic. If youre a young Christian, what should you do? Be good. Its a little vague ...

Theres danger in confusing your political beliefs and your religious beliefs, not noting that theres a difference between them.

What are the biggest ways your life has transformed over the past few years?

Its funny because since Ive been launched into the public eye, lets say, or launched myself or whatever, since Ive become notorious, my life has been very complex. The levity has declined, the playfulness has declined, and its really unfortunate. Im a very playful person. All I did with my kids was play with them, and laugh with them, and joke with them ... but since 2016, things have been complicated. To say the least. My daughter was extremely ill, my wife was extremely ill, and we thought for sure she was going to die. She had a cancer that only 200 people, only 200 cases have ever been reported, and every single one of those people died ... She lived on the edge of life and death for five months.

This is something that really bothers me about the radical left, you get your privilege, and you get to be morally superior because youre standing up for the victim. Its like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time.

At the same time, I had this meteoric rise to public notoriety, fame, which hasnt slowed down at all. In fact, it seems, in some sense, to be accelerating ... My reputation was on the line in an international way, dozens of times. Generally, what Ive observed in peoples lives is if something like that happens to them once on a local scale, thats enough to traumatize them. That happened to me like every week. Its happened to me every week essentially, in multiple countries, for like five years.

People can look at that and think, He should have managed it better. Its like, OK, fair enough, you try it. See how you do. I dont even want to say that, because I wouldnt wish this on anyone. Im not complaining. You might also ask, Why do you think you have the right to continue? Because really, thats the question, Why do you think you have the right to continue?

I certainly doubted it profoundly. I thought, Ill get back on my feet, so I did some podcasts first. Its like, do people find this useful? Will they find it useful? How will they respond? Positively. OK, Ill do another one. How will they respond? Positively, so I think, Im either going to curl up and die, or Im going to continue, and so Im continuing.

Despite all your mental and physical struggles, how have you managed to return? What has helped you pull through?

That I was forgiven by my audience. Here I am this guy, Im a clinical psychologist, I got tangled up with benzodiazepines. Im talking to people about getting their house in order, and things collapse around me. The irony, its almost unbearable.

That was part of what made this so difficult ... not only the physical pain, but this absurd paradox. Yet, people have forgiven me. Im amazed. We say that culture has no capacity for forgiveness. You hear that about cancel culture and about people being eradicated for making one mistake ...

Ive been attacked in the press when people have gone after my reputation with all guns blazing ... being compared to Hitler, etcetera, etcetera. Yet, the support that Ive received has been continuous. Why that is, I have a hypothesis: I include myself in the audience of reprobates to whom Im lecturing. I dont assume that I abide by all these rules. There are targets for attainment, and hopefully, that has protected me at least to some degree, against the perception of undue moral superiority ...

The general public my viewers, readers, and listeners, lets say have been unbelievably loyal and supportive. Ive seen this outpouring of love at the micro-level within my family, and from my friends, and from people I dont know, but who I communicate with. It saved my life for sure.

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Jordan Peterson: Deadly effects of prescription drugs left me bitter, but I refuse to be a victim - New York Post

In the 25th issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates run as the writer on Captain America, a side story follows the main event where the titular superhero speaks at the funeral of a Korean immigrant lawyer named Sung Jin Jeong. The story of the humble lawyer falls somewhat afoul of stereotypes, leaning rather heavily on the antiquated overqualified immigrant trope and not really using an appropriate ethnicity for that kind of story besides, given that South Korea is a developed democracy with an infamously byzantine legal code.

But for this brief story, Coates nevertheless does a good job staking out his ideal vision of what the United States is and should be. Then, a mere three issues later, we get the surreal visual of Red Skull corrupting the youth with a Jordan Peterson-style media empire.

Such is the great irony of our social media moment, when Peterson reacted with bewilderment on Twitter when a fan informed him of the comic in question. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were two of the more important political thought leaders of the teens, but no one would have expected their names to come up simultaneously in this, of all contexts. The shock would be particularly harsh for those who havent been paying attention to them for the last few years. Coates went from meditating on race in The Atlantic to writing superhero comic books. Peterson went from a conscientious objector on the topic of referred pronouns to a self-help guru. So why are they having a spat now?

The answer is more intuitive than you might expect. Both men are still hard at work in the culture war, theyre just doing so from a passive angle now. Coates works in comics because of the abiding belief in liberal circles that pop culture is a direct influence on proper culture, and that social-justice-oriented themes can trickle down to the masses. Peterson has a more direct approach. He observes that people in the United States, and young people in particular, are quite depressed. So he puts out motivational videos and encourages his fans to build up their self-esteem.

His famed 12 steps involve such harmless platitudes as trying to be articulate, making supportive friends, and telling the truth. This aspect of Petersons career is quite unobjectionable on its own. To liberals, the main charge that can be leveled against Peterson is that he uses his genuinely good life advice as a Trojan horse to infect the masses with objectionable right-wing beliefs.

So its easy to see how Coates ended up concluding that turning Red Skull into a Peterson-esque figure was socially relevant, absurd though that idea may seem out of context. But even in the context of his Captain America series, which has visited this theme previously in less bombastic ways, the delivery has fallen flat. With Red Skull previously in the background, Selena Gallio had emerged as the previous high-profile politically themed villain. A nigh-immortal psychic with vampiric abilities, her master plan involved building a cult styled on the old America and farming the gullible humans who joined up for their life energy.

The people who populate this outland village are an obvious template for economic anxiety. They bemoan their lack of opportunities and are grateful for having the chance to just do hard work in a larger community. All of the various normal people who have been turned against their own interests by the villains in Coates Captain America run are like this. The closest Coates gets to convincingly representing them as bad people is via obvious toxic masculinity. They resent the fact that they cant protect their women, or that women have to do the fighting for them, and can even be seen attempting to beat women up.

Coates likely wrote this ambiguity intentionally, to try and avoid overly demonizing his subjects. The problem is, as the absurd Red Skull Peterson climax demonstrates, this has created a world where encouraging people to try and take their life in their own hands and show initiative is evil. Captain America and his superhero co-stars are both incapable of and apparently completely disinterested in trying to push a competing vision.

In all fairness, given that Captain America came out as a Nazi prior to Coates run, their incompetence in this regard is understandable. This too can work at cross purposes. One economically anxious character cites watching helplessly as HYDRA marched through the streets to show his frustrations with the apparent impotence of modern American culture. Its clear that whatever supervillain people end up rallying behind, the chief motivation is less the charisma of the supervillain and more the general despair of everyday life.

Despite framing the ideas these people have for self-improvement as based on displaced nostalgia, Coates himself engages in far greater whitewashing of the past crimes of the United States than the antagonists of his own comic book. Coates introduces the Daughters of Liberty, a group of women from the eighteen century inspired by Enlightenment ideals to fight for freedom. This also includes freedom for slaves, with Harriet Tubman appearing as a member.

Coates should know better than to suggest that liberal thought of the 18th century was conducive to anti-slavery, given how the practice flourished under the watchful eyes of its biggest proponents. Harriet Tubmans own sense of purpose widely understood to derive from her religious conviction, with the Underground Railroad relying heavily on people with more loyalty to God than the United States government.

While Coates is comfortable calling certain idealogues wrong and even expressing sympathy for them, hes frustratingly vague as to what is right. At one moment Captain America shows sympathy with disaffected young Americans, comparing himself with a young man who was unable to join his elder brothers in the NYPD. There is obvious irony in citing the police as a bedrock for solidarity, given the scrutiny they are under both in the real world as well as in the comic universe.

The story of Sung Jin Jeong sticks out chiefly because its the closest Coates Captain America comes to endorsing a certain kind of behavior. But even then, the story is about Sung Jin Jeong rather than Captain America, with the title character coming off as a bit of an afterthought even in the main story. When Red Skull accuses Captain America of standing for an amorphous dream of nothing, the critique hits far harder than it should. Captain America is, literally and figuratively, a fetishization of patriotic World War II era propaganda. Hes just not relevant to our daily lives.

Yet rather incredibly, Peterson is. Hes the whole reason were talking about the Coates run on Captain America at all. Considering that Coates just got a deal to write a new Superman movie and Peterson is still recovering from severe pneumonia, maybe Coates is right to see Peterson as such an ideological threat to his vision of America. Unluckily for Coates, the real Peterson isnt a Nazi, and cant be discredited by just applying red makeup to make him look more evil.

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Jordan Peterson is the Red Skull: Secret Wars - Book and Film Globe

A careless comparison meant to skewer Jordan Peterson is backfiring in a big way.

The psychology professor expressed astonishment when Twitter followers alerted him to obvious parallels between him and the Red Skull, the supervillain in Marvel Comics Captain America franchise.

In the comics latest edition, published March 31, the masked evildoer leads men astray through online lectures. One panel shows the Red Skull promoting 10 rules for life and references chaos and order, apparent allusions to Petersons bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and its sequel, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

Writer and social commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Marvel hired in 2015 to write the Black Panther comics, is the current Captain America series author. While Coates hasnt acknowledged Peterson as the inspiration for Caps nemesis, the similarities are too on-the-nose to be mere coincidence.

Coates Red Skull is an information-age pied piper for disaffected young men whose mind-warping viral videos convert a legion of disciples ready to wreak havoc upon his command. Thats not a far cry from the bad-faith critiques of Petersons work that persist despite thorough debunkings.

Writing for online magazine Slates Brow Beat culture blog, Matthew Dessem describes Peterson as a self-help guru to the alt-right. In fact, Peterson is a steadfast opponent of that movement, who eschews the identity politics of the far right and the woke left with equal vigor and aplomb.

I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological, Peterson said during an August 2017 question-and-answer exchange.

Progressives bristle when he traces intersectionality to its inevitable conclusion: The process of differentiating people by their disadvantages and privileges can only be repeated so many times before you reach the irreducible number of one.

Regarding the individual as the ultimate minority may be anathema to the modern left, but it also obliterates collectivist canards on the right wings outer fringes. The Southern Poverty Law Center says alt-right adherents embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value. Thats incompatible with Petersons appeals to personal responsibility.

Pundits who caricature Peterson as a gateway drug to white supremacy only beclown themselves, and Coates jumps into this trap with both feet, suggesting the self-help author or his supposed comic book alter ego is assembling an army of like-minded sycophants. In reality, Peterson addresses a diverse amalgam of readers and viewers who dont march to the same drumbeat.

Hot takes on the Captain America kerfuffle were similarly sloppy. A Daily Mail article reported that Peterson was angry to learn of the resemblance, while entertainment website Uproxx said he was downright pissed. Red Skull, thin skin, tech blog Boing Boing crowed.

While Petersons initial tweets expressed surprise at the discovery, hes clearly bemused rather than upset. Instead of objecting to the idea of Coates casting him as a villain whose Marvel origin story is head of Nazi terrorist activities trained by Hitler himself, Peterson took ownership of the character and promptly put him through reform school.

In memes shared on his Twitter page, the Red Skull now parrots Petersons philosophy of self-improvement. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth, one reads.

The contrast between exaggerated comic book imagery of a red-faced, glowering menace and practical advice for leading a fulfilling life underscores the absurdity of painting Peterson as a malign influence better than a sober YouTube lecture or an exhaustive written rebuttal ever could. If Coates meant to make the professor a cautionary tale, Peterson turned the tables with pitch-perfect parody.

Twitter followers are in on the joke, too. One imagined Peterson as Lobsterman, a reference to the first chapter in 12 Rules that compares humans and lobsters physical response to defeat, noting that the mood-regulating hormone serotonin affects dominance hierarchies in both species.

Peterson embraced the lobster motif, tweeting an illustration of a red-and-black shield featuring a stylized six-legged crustacean fit for display on a caped crusaders chest.

Coates overlooked the downside to writing a rival into a timeless tale, rendering him immortal in a narrative sense. A villain can always become a hero; redemption arcs, after all, are as much a comic book trope as the heel turn.

Corey Friedman is an opinion journalist who explores solutions to political conflicts from an independent perspective. Follow him on Twitter @coreywrites.

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