Jordan Peterson

Since his recent joining of far-right conservative news website and media company "The Daily Wire," some of Jordan Peterson's fans are now done with him. And that's a good thing.

You can scroll back into the history of this blog and find several articles I've written on this man and the far right-wing nonsense he spreads. But let's start with what he does right. He is a professor of psychology after all, which makes him more than qualified to speak authoritatively on that subject. He's good at his profession, and that's not me saying that:

Peterson’s research specialty is personality traits; one of his most prominent papers is a study of what makes people more or less creative, where he argues that people who pay more attention to seemingly “irrelevant” details actually tend to be more creative. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited more than 10,000 times in academic publications and is one of the 70 most cited researchers in his subfield.
_{source: Vox}

And I guess that also makes his self-help books worth something for the people, young disaffected men mainly, who need this kind of support. I've seen many statements online from people who were really helped by "12 Rules for Life" and its successor "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." The man isn't completely worthless. But his rise to fame has nothing to do with what he's good at unfortunately, but with what he's extremely bad at. This started at the very beginning of his rise to fame when he railed against the infamous C-16 bill in Canada. He made a YouTube video in which he courageously declares that he will never bow down to the Canadian government's authoritarian crack-down on free speech and will not abide by the bill's requirement for the use of correct gender-pronouns. This made him an instant free-speech warrior in right-wing circles and popular in the anti-wokeness online communities. Only problem is that he lied about the bill. Here's the explanation from his own university in Toronto:

Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson has made headlines the last two weeks, claiming that the Bill before the federal House of Commons is an unprecedented attack on free speech. He has claimed that the new law will criminalize the failure to use individual’s preferred pronouns. In a rally at the University of Toronto last week, he went so far as to say that the bill is the most serious infringement of freedom of speech ever in Canada.

The thing is – he is wrong.

Bill C-16 does three things.

First – It adds the words “gender identity or expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Code. This will prevent the federal government and businesses within federal jurisdiction – like banks – from discriminating on the basis of gender identity and gender expression.

The federal government is late to this game – most of the provinces and territories already include gender identity and gender expression in their provincial Human Rights Codes.
_{source: University of Toronto}

Just to be clear: no one, as far as I'm able to discern, has been arrested or convicted just for not using a correct pronoun. And that's not what the bill does anyway; like all other free speech laws, it protects us from the government, not from fellow citizens. Or from Twitter or YouTube; they can make up their own terms of service, as Jordan Peterson knows very well. As if the subject of free speech isn't complex enough all by itself, Jordan has found out that it's very lucrative to spread more confusion about it. He even once said something like, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I discovered how to monetize the woke mob!" He knows very well that his statements on politics, religion and the "culture war" are designed to incite anger. The whole C-16 episode was an early example of what would become a hallmark of Peterson's approach as a public intellectual - taking inflammatory, somewhat misinformed stances on issues of public concern outside his area of expertise.

The nonsense coming from his mouth is just too much to repeat here, but I'll go over some of the hits. He claimed, in a debate with atheist Matt Dillahunty, that people can't stop smoking without divine, or at the very least spiritual intervention. He's built an entire theory about social and cultural hierarchies based on mistaken assumptions derived from lobster-biology. He spreads the old Nazi conspiracy theory about cultural Marxism (originally cultural bolshevism or Kulturbolschewismus in German). He said that atheists aren't really atheists, and he said that to atheists. According to him "white privilege" and "systemic racism" don't exist. Recently he claimed in a Joe Rogan podcast that "climate" is the same as "everything" and therefore we can't do anything about climate change, because it's impossible to know every parameter of everything. For a "public intellectual" he surely has some messed up opinions, but opinions that do well among the far right nonetheless.

I've always called him out on these fascist-adjacent statements. The only difference between Peterson and Sargon of Akkad is that Peterson dresses the garbage up in academic sounding word salad. He comes across as legitimate and trustworthy, talks like he's an expert on things he knows little to nothing about, but always reaffirming the ideas behind far right ideologies. People like him, Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones and Steven Crowder seem to never be bothered by the fact that much of their fan-base consists of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. If I were a public figure and saw so many far right extremists among my followers, I'd stop and try to understand why that is the case, examine what I said to attract them. But Jordan seems happy, and so do Ben, Alex and Steven, probably because they make so much money by spreading hate, fear and misinformation.

But it seems that in the case of Jordan Peterson at least some of his followers are waking up to the fact that he indeed spreads far right-wing misinformation, something that's been obvious for anyone not blinded by his meteoric rise to stardom or already in the far right camp of the politically induced culture war. I'll leave you with two videos on the sad decline of his star. Linked above is one about his recent escapades on The Daily Wire, and below is a treasure of almost three hours worth of his rise and fall.

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