‘What does the healthy and socially adapted individual do when the custom he holds dear is challenged? He demonizes the enemy, as prime threat to his “identity,” and goes to war.’
—Jordan Peterson.1
N.B.—The following post-script was written in late 2022. Peterson has only grown more extreme since.
I finished writing these articles on Peterson in early 2021. Though I heard little of Peterson after I , I remained aware of what I said. Trauma and anxiety that threatened the mapping between a liberal’s beliefs, values and reality could produce an ‘emotional reflex action’ that leads them towards fascist politics. Fascism, we must recall, is an iatrogenic ‘antidote to chaos.’ A treatment that harms when it should cure.
Between 2019 and 2021, Peterson’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. He overcame a terrible struggle with addiction, suicidality and anxiety. Like everyone else, he underwent the collective trauma of the covid-19 crisis. Over these months, then, Peterson sustained a tremendous amount of emotional damage. A terror of death probably dominated his psychic life for nearly two years. This, I felt, would be the kind of anxiety that could provoke a fascist ‘emotional reflex action’ in Peterson.
In January 2022 Peterson dragged his drug-addled body back into the spotlight and became unignorable once more. He made headlines on news sites I read when he compared ‘transgenderism’ to ‘ritual satanic abuse’ in an interview with Joe Rogan.2 His transphobia, formerly disguised behind his protests against ‘mandated speech laws,’ had now become a clear, open fact. Seeing this, I then looked to his Twitter and found a post from August 2021. ‘A very large proportion of the insistence on the distinction between gender and sex,’ he wrote, ‘is undiagnosed (and self serving) narcissism.’3 As far as I was aware, Peterson’s bigotry—indeed, his own ‘undiagnosed (and self serving) narcissism’—had never been so obvious.
A week before he spoke with Joe Rogan, Peterson also published an editorial in Canada’s National Post: ‘Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto.’4 There he explained how, in a bizarre and utterly masochistic move, he resigned because ‘Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity mandates’ had made his job ‘morally untenable.’ Most of his word count was then spent railing against ‘D.I.E.’ in universities and Hollywood; he also spared a few words to align himself with neoliberals like Milton Friedman with his ire for corporate ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ practices.5 But next came the piece’s most baffling passage. Peterson quoted two paragraphs from a then-recent speech by Vladimir Putin where the Russian leader spoke of the danger posed by Western identity politics. In that speech, Putin describes the similarities between contemporary identity politics and Bolshevik ideology; he also concludes that America’s propaganda goes even further than the Soviet Union’s agitprop departments. Clearly, Putin’s ideas on such topics mirror Peterson’s own. Yet nowhere in his piece does Peterson reflect on the fact that his ‘classical liberalism’ has left him aligned, once again, with an authoritarian tyrant. Putin’s words are presented as an accurate diagnosis of the left’s corruption when, really, they condemn only Peterson.
Things deteriorated quickly for Peterson in 2022. In February, he became the third ante-fascist musician covered in this book when he released his first original song: ‘Wake Up.’6 The song, which sounds like something Pink Floyd might have recorded if the band preferred antipsychotics to LSD, was Peterson’s call to arms against Justin Trudeau. Outraged by Canada’s covid-19 policies, Peterson composed, wrote, recorded and released this incensed protest song. Peterson’s anthem took aim at the ever-growing group of fascists in our society – Trudeau himself, the ‘climate fascists,’ the ‘corporate fascists’ at Twitter who censor right-wing posts, and the ‘medical fascists’ responsible for covid-19 mask and vaccine policies.7 A brave musical move. Despite his anti-fascist fury, though, we have yet to hear a sophomore single that attacks actual tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin or Ron DeSantis. If inspiration strikes I suggest he experiment with a more ‘David Bowie on vast amounts of cocaine’ kind of sound next time around. That might fit his politics better.
In May 2022, Peterson’s online bigotry made headlines once again. In a fat-phobic tirade he declared that a Sports Illustrated cover of a plus-size model was ‘not beautiful.’ ‘[N]o amount of authoritarian tolerance,’ he said, ‘is going to change that.’8 A few weeks later, he attacked Elliot Page, the actor who had then recently revealed they are trans, claiming that Page was corrupting the youth by having their ‘breasts removed by a criminal physician.’9 Twitter swiftly banned him. In response, Peterson posted videos to YouTube where he called the transgender identity a ‘viciously harmful fad.’ He also claimed that gender-affirming care conducted by ‘a butcher masquerading as a benevolent surgeon’ is ‘Auschwitz and Gulag-level wrong. It’s Nazi medical experiment-level wrong.’10 YouTube demonetised Peterson’s channel after this virulent burst of transphobia.
An aside - it seems Peterson has also developed a weird, recent obsession with child abuse. In October 2022 he published a book called An ABC of Childhood Tragedy, which contains 26 short poems that depict children being raped, killed, and abused by adults who do not adhere to traditional values. One excerpt: ‘D: Dick was a damaged little boy, whose prancing father made him coy, when he ended up in jail, all competed for his tail.’ The homophobia here is astonishing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book has received almost no publicity whatsoever; I discovered it only because Google recommended the title to me as I researched this postscript.
Were all this not enough to show that Peterson moved along the ante-fascist spectrum after his years of trauma and anxiety, in July 2022 he published an article that effectively justified Putin’s war against Ukraine.11 In this piece, Peterson argues that the war in Ukraine was not caused by Russia’s Weimar-ish experience of collapse in the ‘90s, or the country’s disillusionment with capitalism and democracy—both of which at first made things worse than even the final years of Gorbachev’s rule for average Russians—or two decades of corrupt and murderous rule by Putin and the country’s oligarchs, or the vested economic interests in commodities like oil and gas of said oligarchs, or Putin’s fascistic beliefs in the common ethnic destiny of Russians and Ukrainians, or the genocidal hatred towards Ukrainians espoused by parts of the Russian state media, or any of the country’s other extremely significant internal problems. Rather it is the West’s ‘war of ideas that has given rise to the current real war.’12 ‘Russians believe that they have a moral duty – the highest moral duty,’ he says, ‘to oppose the degenerate ideas, philosophy and the theology of the West.’13 The ‘woke triumvirate of diversity, inclusivity, and equity’14 that forced his resignation also led Putin to invade Ukraine. Russian soldiers now murder Ukrainians to keep ‘the pathological West’ and its ideas out. Putin’s purported logic, of course, echoes the arguments Peterson has made for years now. Peterson therefore agrees that the West really is ‘degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner’ and sympathises with the Russians who ‘object to the nightmare of compassionate authoritarianism.’ The best solution, he then concludes, is not for Ukraine to defeat Russia and reclaim their stolen territory, but to appoint a new Ukrainian leader ‘subject to joint Western-Russian observers.’15
A disclaimer early in Peterson’s article insists Putin’s acts are ‘unconscionable.’16 Yet his arguments, Žižek notes, morph into a ‘metaphysical defence of Russia’ that underwrites their ‘moral duty’ to butcher thousands of innocent Ukrainians.17 Peterson supposedly deplores war. Nonetheless he participates in the prelude to violence, relentlessly demonising the Western ‘degeneracy’ that purportedly provoked mass executions, torture and airstrikes. Meanwhile his solution to the ‘nightmare of compassionate authoritarianism’ is simply Russian authoritarianism and imperialism. Peterson may not explicitly agree with Putin’s actions. Yet his arguments only defend what Žižek calls the ‘neo-fascist conservatism’ that underwrites the invasion.18 Ironically, Peterson therefore stands in the place of his most hated opponents—leftist writers like Marx whose ideas, he repeatedly claims, led directly to the atrocities of the Soviet Union—but remains blind to the way Russia’s violence today is the unspeakable telos of his own beliefs.
In a 2022 interview, Kanye West said ‘pretty much everyone is more intelligent than Jordan Peterson.’19 This is debatable. What is beyond argument, though, is that pretty much everyone is less fascist than Jordan Peterson in 2022. Just like Ye, Peterson’s fascist tendencies exploded after his traumatic struggles with suicide, addiction and anxiety. This self-proclaimed liberal’s ‘emotional reflex action’ has led him to adopt the complete obverse of his stated beliefs. No longer can we call Peterson an ante-fascist, then. He has now drunk deeply from the liberal’s iatrogenic antidote to chaos and, more fascist than ever before, Jordan Peterson inflicts as much harm on the world as he can. Let us hope he is silent soon.
That’s the end of our special series on Jordan Peterson. Please click here to explore our Main Series, and here to read our Guest Posts.
Endnotes
‘Neuropsychology and Mythology of Motivation for Group Aggression,’ in The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 2, p.530.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rogan-podcast-peterson-trans-contagion-b2001612.html
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1422578143278338051
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-why-i-am-no-longer-a-tenured-professor-at-the-university-of-toronto
Capitalism and Freedom, pp.133-136.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYoh_5xMrBs. Note that the original video has since been removed; this is a lower quality upload.
On Twitter, Peterson responded to a post about the amount of taxpayer funding Trudeau dedicated to the CCB with Mussolini’s definition of fascism. He wrote: ‘Fascism, defined by Mussolini: the collusion and unification of corporation and government. Press perhaps foremost among them. See https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1497216596737146897?lang=en-GB. For medical fascism, see: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1598894505037811712; for climate fascists, see: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1598799052346658819; for Twitter and media fascism, see: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1598347107710402560 and https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1602393169433329680.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jordan-peterson-quits-twitter-calling-231218547.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10997765/Jordan-Peterson-Doubles-Attacking-Elliot-Page.html
https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/08/04/elliot-page-jordan-peterson-youtube/
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE and and https://www.dailywire.com/news/russia-vs-ukraine-or-civil-war-in-the-west
See 44:37 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
See 34:41 to 34:50 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
See 46:14 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
See 36:49 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
See 00:54 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
See https://jordantimes.com/opinion/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek/what-%E2%80%98woke%E2%80%99-left-and-alt-right-share
See https://jordantimes.com/opinion/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek/what-%E2%80%98woke%E2%80%99-left-and-alt-right-share and https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/03/what-i-don-t-want-is-western-triumphalism
https://timcast.com/news/cashman-the-last-ye-fan-on-earth/