One last thing of note to take from the Crimson article, Peterson’s obsession with the Cold War. The second paragraph, “... few may know that Peterson studies aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse and first got interested in psychology by reflecting on the Cold War”.
Talking about his break year between his first and second bachelor’s degrees, “At that time, 1982, the Cold War was still raging madly away and I was curious about how it could be that a group of people could have set up such a strange situation.” But because political science “did not answer his questions”, “I was interested in how individuals could lead a group to commit these atrocities, I was interested in typing to find out why people were so interested in their ideological positions that they would kill to maintain them.”
As has been repeatedly noted, Jeeperson’s home is full of Soviet propaganda. He even has some over his bed. His home is wall to wall Soviet art. The man has a strange obsession. Even though the state-owned, fascist capitalist soviet empire collapsed more than 25 years ago, it was such a huge part of his childhood that he’s unwilling to let it go. That probably says a lot about him. He’s still fighting a war a lot of other people don’t even remember.
And you can hear that in a lot of his fear-mongering. His favorite boogeyman is “postmodern neomarxism”. We’ll get to why that’s a serious problem in a minute. For now, let’s tackle the two words in that phrase.
Postmodernism has long been boogeyman for the right. What postmodernism is is fairly difficult to say, because the movement as a whole is 1) very diverse and 2) opposed to sweeping labels. As for diversity, postmodernism isn’t just a philosophical movement; it’s also an artistic and architectural movement. And those are both largely unconnected to the philosophical movement, and even within philosophy there’s a huge range of diversity. And that’s largely because one of the only things they have in common is rejecting labels, rejecting sweeping narratives and unity.
As for “neo-marxism”... well, that’s not well-defined, but it’s not like it’s a ridiculous word. Schools of thought evolve over time, they collect more evidence, people do more work. If marxism hadn’t changed over the century plus since Marx wrote, that would be a problem. We can just as easily talk about neo-marxism as we can neoliberalism.
But postmodernism rejects sweeping narratives of history, and marxism is a sweeping narrative of history. Marxism posits that strong economic forces drive history, forcing the rulers and the ruled into conflict over and over and over. The ruling class rules by means of a philosophy; that inspires the ruled to develop a counter-philosophy. The conflict between them leads to the creation of a new philosophy that drives the new ruling class.
Postmodernism rejects that sort of grand idea, that there is a unifying force that explains all of history. So trying to claim that something is both postmodern and neo-marxist … that’s kind of asinine.
But we shouldn’t be too surprised that Jeepers doesn’t know what the hell postmodernism is. Fools on the right love to take words and turn them into scary labels absent any meaning other than “BAD BAD THIS THING BAD”. Like “radical feminist” or “gender theory” or “Jew” or “please stop doing that”. So when Jeep says that, he’s not really talking about anything real, he’s just saying “there’s a bad thing and I don’t like it”; it doesn’t have to have an actual reference.
But “postmodern neo-marxist” is actually worse than that. Jeepers took it a step away from another popular phrase floating around the right wing edges of the internet, “cultural marxist”. And that’s bad, because it’s a step removed from “cultural bolshevik”, which was popular in the middle of the twentieth century, and never really went away.
The … hypothesis? Model? The idea at the core of this is that there is some evil force coming in “from outside” that is trying to destroy our “culture and heritage”. In the US today, the focus of this conspiracy theory is on the “left coast elites” and university academics (Jeeperson proposed a rating system for students to use to identify “neo-marxist content” so leftist professors could be disciplined). However, for all the veneer, it amounts to the same thing as it did when it was German Nazis in the 1930s talking about cultural Bolsheviks. The Jews.
Is Jordan Peterson an anti-semite? Yes and no. Well, just yes, not no. Yes. He is an anti-semite.
Jeepers is a far-right wing white guy, and he despises identity politics because he doesn’t want to think of himself has having race or gender; he grew up very comfortable in a culture that took whiteness and maleness as the norm. The push by the modern left to disrupt that narrative, to allow people of all races, genders, etc. to be part of our culture rather than othering most to the profit of a few, has upset people like him.
Anyway, Jeeperson wrote an article, “On the so-called “Jewish Question”” (link in the thingy). Of course, he has to link identity politics on the left to identity politics on the right… that’s horse shit.
Identity politics on the left is a defensive reaction to the identity politics of the right. Blackness wasn’t a thing until white people started enslaving black people. Minority groups defending themselves against genocide by the majority? NOT THE SAME THING.
His link is to say there’s an oppressed group and an oppressor, but he claims the conspiracy theory of right-wing assholes about a Jewish illuminati is the same thing as racism. Or sexism, or homophobia…. God, I hate dishonest right-wing assholes like him.
But he is expressly decrying the far-right wing conspiracy theory, right? He’s saying they’re wrong! Right? Not exactly.
“Jews are disproportionately over-represented in positions of authority, competence, and influence. New York Jews, in particular, snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes, and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities…”
and, to explain that disparity,
“Three well-documented factors appear to be at play:
- The significantly higher than average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews…
- The relationship between IQ and Big Five Trait Openness to Experience…
- The relationship between Openness to Experience and political liberalism…”
Concluding with, “So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference … is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.”
First, Jeeperson is a race essentialist. Talking about the Ashkenazi as a group, how they have higher IQs… ew. Second, talking about Jews in this way? Really, really Nazi. White supremacists use this and similar talking points about Asians as a way to claim they’re not white supremacists. “I think race X is smarter than white people! I can’t be racist!” Wait a second… Asians… I don’t know if you could hear it, but there were a lot of ellipses in the quotes up there that I used to shorten Jeeperson’s article to something quotable.
“... and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against…”
For someone who wants to distance himself from fascists and skinheads, he’s doing a really, really good job of throwing out their talking points. Talking about racial IQ and how Jews and Asians are smarter than white people…
And the fact is that it’s really sketchy that Jeeperson is even talkine agrees “We’re measuring something, but we don’t really know what we’re measuring.” Ig about IQ in the first place. IQ is a seriously dodgy method of measuring intelligence. Everyons it a measure of general intelligence, or is just a measure of the ability to take an IQ test? IQ does correlate with later success, but so does class and skin color. There’s also the problem that IQ tests have historically been pretty goddamn racist.
We know that using IQ tests to bolster beliefs about race is garbage (even though that has been their primary purpose for the century of their existence), because people who have been the targets of oppression have been closing the gap in IQ tests steadily ever since we finally put an end to segregation. Hell, you can study for IQ tests and improve your score. Basically, we know that IQ tests have a lot of problems, there’s no guarantee they measure what we want them to measure, they are hugely influenced by social factors.
And Peterson absolutely should know this. He’s supposed to be an expert in this kind of shit. Ever since he landed in Toronto, his whole schtick has been the foundations of personality, and this isn’t even high level stuff. The problems with IQ tests are psych 101. We know he knows about IQ and its relationship to the big five because he mentions that relationship in his anti-semitic cockwaffle about “the so-called Jewish Question”. And yet he’s using IQ to backstop this shit.
In other words, Jeeperson is “the thinking man’s anti-semite”. Like all the other heroes of the dork web, the leaders of the alt-right, his purpose in the movement is to cloak their naked bigotry in intellectual verbiage, to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for their beliefs, a false justification for the things they want to do to minorities. His article claims to be an argument against anti-semitism, but all it does is use anti-semitic, fascist talking points in order to argue that there’s no conspiracy.
Let me repeat that quote from earlier:
“So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ.”
That’s the exact line of reasoning you get out of the new breed of fascists. Richard Spencer, Gavin McInnes, and the other “thinkers” in openly fascist movements try to use those sorts of arguments to “prove” they’re not racist. “I’m not a white supremacist, I think Asians are smarter than white people! If anything, I’m an asian supremacist!” Jeepers is providing pseudo-scientific justification against a conspiracy theory, arguing in favor of fascist race essentialism, the so-called “race realism” of new wave fascists. And it’s tied directly to all the old fascist myths about Jews.
Plenty of people have done excellent work outlining the basics of fascism. Instead of recommending a random search that could turn up who knows what, I’m going to recommend specific youtubers (and link them in the thingy): Thought Slime, Kat Blaque, ContraPoints, Innuendo Studios, ShaunandJen, and Three Arrows have all done a lot of work deconstructing these things. I’m morally certain there are far more, because fascism has been on the rise, but those are the ones I know off the top of my head.
In any event, one of the things fascism uses to define itself is a hated out-group, a way to drum up aggression and emotion in their base of support. They define their in-group, connect it to a mythological past when the in-group was great, then blame the out-group for the present being crap. That out-group is always demonized as morally horrific, and is also simultaneously fiendishly clever but ultimately stupid and weak. Thus the out-group can be blamed for short-term losses (clever) but can by mythologized to ultimately lose (because morally and intellectually weak).
You see that everywhere in 20th century fascist propaganda about Jews. You also see it in 19th and 20th century racist propaganda against Asian immigrants. The intelligence of Asians is central to the white supremacist view of Asian culture, but also built into it is the belief that Asians are physically, morally, emotionally weak, and that they deserve to be dominated (by white people) because of that.
Peterson’s essay only superficially appears to be combating the anti-semitic beliefs of his fascist fans. In reality he’s adding a layer of plausible deniability. Jordan B Peterson is an anti-semitic asshole. And that extends beyond just talking about “the so-called Jewish Question” to all the other races. He had a sit down with notoriously bigoted and hateful YouTuber Stefan Molyneux (link in the thingy), in which they traded racist talking points around IQ and how society is structured the way it is because of MERIT and some people are just better than others.
Know what else they talk about? Women! Well, not really. Molyneux drops a bit about women being dumb, but Jeepers knows the IQ data doesn’t back that up, so he bats it away and keeps talking about race. Still it lets me make the segue because holy hell Jeeperson is misogynistic.
Back in April, an ingrown toenail of a human being drove a van through a crowded marketplace in Toronto; link in the thingy. This sparked a big conversation, because the terrorist was a middle class white dude. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vIBijzg4w) He didn’t claim any strong religious or political affiliation. How could this be? Only muslims kill people!
Minassian identified himself as an incel, involuntarily celibate, a guy who couldn’t get laid. The term originated with a small, early internet community in 1993. Things have changed in the last 25 years. Now it’s a virulently hateful internet subculture dedicated to the hatred of women. I strongly recommend the Incels video by Contrapoints, where she does a deep dive on the topic (link in the thingy).
Long story short, they hate women. A lot. Their personalities are all pretty shit, and hanging out in their incel forums spending all their time talking about how ugly they all are and how women are all shallow evil bitches really, really doesn’t help that. So they don’t get laid, and they channel all their frustration over that into hating women, and occasionally these guys lash out in extreme violence. A young man named Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates and tried to murder a sorority in 2014 and, unable to get through the locked door of their house, murdered several people on the street before getting in his car and trying to find other victims, shooting some and running over others. All told, he killed six and injured 14 more before killing himself.
And Minassian explicitly praised Rodger online prior to his own attack.
Why bring this up? Because Jeepers had a response, of course!
Citing his quote from the New York Times article referenced earlier, “Custodian of the Patriarchy”: “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him, … The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
Now, that sounds pretty goddamn clear. Especially when you hear Jeeperson try to explain it. Why would he have to explain it? Because everyone immediately said, “Wait, these guys can’t get laid and you jump to enforced monogamy… you mean forcing women to have sex with these men?”
Of course Jeeperson walked that back. He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s trying to force people to do anything. I’ma go ahead and link to an episode of Cognitive Dissonance, because 1) they’re hilarious, and 2) they recently took this precise bit of the Jeep’s bullshit to pieces. They said it quite well (1 hour 15 ish minutes in): he’s tried to claim that he meant social enforcement, that humans naturally have a tendency toward monogamy because of children, and we should re-inforce that. But he never actually says “reinforce”.
And the CogDis guys nailed it here: it’s because Jeeperson’s a coward. It’s absolutely clear from everything he’s saying that, if we don’t enforce monogamy, then females will all go for the “high status males”. Yes, he believes in hierarchies, remember? So he thinks that some men are just better, and women (being shallow sluts), will all gravitate to the alpha males, and the alphas will have huge harems. That’s made clear in the clip CogDis responds to, a segment from when Jeepers was on Dave Rubin’s show, where he almost randomly brings up polygamy and how that’s illegal now.
In other words, Jeepers responded to the incel killing by talking about god and enforced monogamy because he agrees with the incels. Incels talk about “Chad” and “Stacy”, alpha males and slutty females. They think they’re not getting laid because the alphas are hogging all the women and women are all sluts and on, and on, and on. Jeepers thinks that society is falling apart because we’re not required to live in the strict hierarchy he advocates, that sexual morality (meaning every individual woman being the property of some particular man) is no longer enforced by law.
But he backed the fuck down from that statement because he didn’t want to face the actual social consequences of openly advocating the vile shit he believes.
And that’s the sort of thing Jeep does all the damn time. He works very, very hard to be unclear. He strives to make his statements vague enough that they can mean different things. He wants his fascist fanboys to understand him when he talks about race, genetics, hierarchies, women, IQ, all that shit, but so that he can back away and pretend that’s not what he was saying when confronted about it.
As when BBC Channel 4’s Cathy Newman tried to interview Jeeperson back in January (link in the thing). She kept trying to say “So you believe misogynist thing X”, and he kept squirming away, denying it, and throwing out his pseudo-science shit-waffles. His fans loved it because they thought it meant he “won” the interview, and centrists dismissed Newman’s efforts as a dishonest smear because “she kept wrongly accusing Peterson of things”.
Make no mistake, though, if you follow Jeepers for long enough, you’ll see that his view of women is dim, and his opinion on where they belong is clear. He sees women as lying sluts who do not belong in the workplace. He’s convinced they’re not very bright, and take advantage of men. He wants to force them to act “properly”.
[FADE TO BLACK]
Before I conclude, something that popped up while I was writing this. Jeeperson defended Nazis. Well, he defended Nazis last year during his interview with Sam Harris. I mentioned this when I called Sam Harris a far right wing douche. It’s just taken until now for the mainstream media to really figure out that Jeepers is fascist as hell. He offered a defense of the Holocaust, describing it as a logical progression of events.
There’s an excellent article in the Independent (link in the thingy) going over this, linking Jeep’s casual apologia with Senator Lindsey Graham’s defense of our own war crimes at the US Mexico border in response to hundreds of Hondurans seeking asylum. As the article’s author, Matt Greene, makes clear, the Holocaust was a logical progression because fascism will take whatever path necessary to get to the end goal of genocide. If the Nazis could have started with gas chambers, they would have.
But is he really defending the Holocaust? Or is he just trying to understand the Holocaust? Taken in isolation, perhaps we could give Jeeperson the benefit of the doubt. But this isn’t the only thing he’s done that indicates he’s defending rather than understanding. He’s explicitly used neo-nazi rhetoric describing the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (going beyond simply “the Jews” to specifically identifying a certain ethnic subgroup). He also absolutely adores the anti-semitic “postmodern neo-marxist” dog whistle. If I were willing to dig in, how many more examples would I find?
I’m going to leave that there. Jeepers disgusts me and I’m not eager to spend more time digging into his odious beliefs than I have to.
So I’ve tried to talk about different parts of Peterson’s life and career, here. Give a few highlights to try and flesh out who he is as a person and public figure. What can we get out of all of this? Who is he as an academic, a teacher, a public speaker, as a person?
He’s a fascist.
Gotta be honest, I wasn’t expecting to come to that conclusion. I was fairly well aware of Jeeperson and his controversies going into this, but I thought he was a Christian conservative with fascist sympathies. I wrote my intro, the guy who wakes up and realizes he’s mediocre and runs in terror from that realization, because I thought that’s what he was. A guy who thought he’d change the world and was appalled that he hadn’t.
I figured his would be the more prosaic racism of Yer Dad; from Philosophy Tube’s discussion of Transphobia: yer dad has never really thought about these things, is uncomfortable with change, but isn’t hateful or dedicated to bigotry and can change with a little work.
Nope. Peterson has done a lot of thinking about this. He is hateful, and he is dedicated. He has spent a lot of time over the years honing his beliefs, dedicating himself to a view of humanity that essentializes them and connects them to a mythological worldview. He explicitly wants a hierarchy with a certain kind of person (himself) at the top, and people he views as biologically inferior or morally degenerate at the bottom.
And he’s dishonest. Fascism as a system of beliefs is concerned almost exclusively with power, the in-group, and hierarchy, and have no qualms about how they achieve those goals. Fascist will happily work within the system to get to power: Mussolini marched on Rome with tens of thousands of armed men, but Hitler positioned himself within government and manipulated the system to seize control. A simple fascist credo could be stated as “it’s okay so long as I’m the one doing it”.
Peterson’s classes freely mixed fact and fiction so that he could spin a compelling vision of psychology and human nature. His entire program of research in grad school and Harvard was a smokescreen so he could get tenure, securing the freedom to pursue his agenda. His public lectures match his teaching style, pretending to expertise outside his field and telling lies in support of his beliefs. He deliberately strives for ambiguity so that he never has to answer to critics for his beliefs and statements.
Peterson’s entire career has been a campaign of dishonesty, misstatements, lies, and obfuscation for the purpose of, in Peterson’s view, saving the world from the Dragon of Chaos. He believes he has found the central, true narrative of human history. He believes he has the key to understanding everything thanks to his Jungian mythicism, his Christian narcissism, his fascist hierarchism.
Who is he?
Jordan B. Peterson is a mystic. He believes he has unique, special, unquestionable access to the truth about reality and human nature.
Jordan B. Peterson is a quack. His career as a public speaker is dedicated to spreading lies and pseudoscience in order to support his bigotry.
Jordan B. Peterson is a misogynist, a racist, an anti-semite. He believes in an unchanging core of every human being, based partly in biology and partly in the soul, that places them permanently within a hierarchical structure, with himself at the top.
Jordan B. Peterson is an unprincipled zealot. His professional life has been a deliberate falsification intended to put him in a position to preach with credentials so that he can lead young white men to his better world.
Jordan B. Peterson is a fascist.
Links
- The Crimson article on Peterson
- The NY Times article on JBeep: Custodian of the Right
- Beeper's shitty "On the So-Called Jewish Question" blog post
- YouTubers who have covered fascism
- Six minutes of fashy chat with Peterson and Molyneux
- The Toronto van killer
- Contra's excellent Incels video
- The Cognitive Dissonance episode including their takedown of Beep
- The fun BBC4 interview with JB
- The article in the Independent on Beep's Holocaust apology
