Brief: Why Didn’t I Yell STFU at Jordan Peterson in 2017?
In the spring of 2017, Jordan Peterson first went viral by writing this in Canada’s National Post:
I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
Remember that horseshit, or things like it? Did you guffaw because he was obviously absurd? Did you try to reason with his stans online? Did you see him as a crank influencer, or a dangerous political figure?
Did you hope his ideas would be beaten down in the marketplace of ideas? Or did you seek him out at a public event and shout him down with a bullhorn?
Today, word salad like this is everywhere—including in Project 2025, now driving the Trump admin.
Matthew visits the antifascist woodshed to investigate the liberal manners, free speech naivety, and lack of community alliances that dissuaded him from grabbing the mic during a Peterson Q&A in 2017 and shouting:
“Your ideas are fascist and you should STFU. You are endangering trans people with your bullshit. Why do you care about how they experience their bodies, you whining pervert? Why are you inciting hatred against young people who want a better world?”
Because… look where we are now.
Show Notes
Read the Memo Pausing Federal Grants and Loans - The New York Times
President George H.W. Bush on political correctness (1991)
The History of Political Correctness—Lind
The Pitfalls of Liberalism — Kwame Ture
The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic | Scientific American
Jordan Peterson: The right to be politically incorrect | National Post
Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity or expression)
Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey
Postmodern Neo-Marxism — Jordan Peterson’s Shadow
Doug Ford met Jordan Peterson, appointment calendar reveals | CBC News
Why are the Proud Boys so violent? Ask Gavin McInnes — SPLC
Jordan Peterson revealed he once earned $400,000 a month
Antifa by Mark Bray
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism, i.e.
your daily news feed at this point.
I think you know where to follow us, and please support our Patreon.
So, where are we at?
It's day 20 in America's continually emerging fascist regime and its chaotic influence over the rest of the world.
And if you're like me, you've been bouncing between the feeling of acute multiple traumas and undifferentiated dread.
So I'm not going to add to the news crush because it's all too much.
And also because...
There are super brave journalists out there who have that well in hand.
In particular, I want to ping Tim Marchman and his team at Wired Magazine, who at great personal risk are breaking most of the news around Elon Musk's techno-fash coup and are now being threatened by Musk for naming the bros who might, you know, be using your personal info to train AIs that will turn your social security payments into meme coins.
One benefit of really clear on-the-ground reporting is that it gives writers like me the space to spin up an essay on what it means to not respond appropriately to fascism over years because of liberal naiveties and manners.
Now, I'm not going to be lashing out at anybody else here.
I'm really looking at my own arc over the past eight years, and that's why my title is Why didn't I yell shut the fuck up at Jordan Peterson in 2017?
So, little content warning for language as well.
Now, I remembered my audience encounter with Jordan Peterson in 2017 after reading the January 27th memo ordering the impounding of the federal purse.
It was written by Matthew Vaith, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
This Project 2025-flavored line stopped me in my tracks.
Quote, Now, this shit is a century old.
Marxist, as a prefix or suffix for anything evil, goes right back to the early Nazis inventing the smear of cultural Bolshevism to denounce degenerate art and music and anything that criticized patriarchal order and to position the Reich as the ultimate guardian of traditional culture.
Sound familiar?
It then echoes in post-war U.S. Red Scare politics and By the early 90s, it finds a more genteel register when we hear Poppy Bush whining about political correctness and free speech.
And that leads to William Lind, who was a colleague of Paul Weyrich at the Heritage Foundation, coining the term cultural Marxism in 1998, which Jordan Peterson then takes up and runs with in 2017. Now,
at the center of this essay is my memory of a balmy night in June of that year when I attended a Jordan Peterson Bible Symbolism lecture here in Toronto that wasn't about Bible symbolism at all.
I sat there in a crowd of about 500 people listening to dog whistles stigmatizing trans people and leftists.
I was paralyzed as the great professor of psychology and religion ranted about pronouns.
I knew what I was hearing, but when it came time for Q&A and all the bros lined up in the aisles to kiss his ass, I didn't grab the mic and disrupt the whole thing by shouting, your ideas are fascist and you should shut the fuck up.
You are endangering trans people with your bullshit.
Why do you care about how they experience their bodies, you whining pervert?
Why are you inciting hatred against young people who want a better world?
Now, that would have felt great.
But I didn't do that for a number of reasons.
I mean, I'd gone to the event alone.
I have a decent sense of self-preservation.
My hero complex index is pretty low.
In remembering this particular origin point for Peterson's contribution to the Trump era and how it intersected with my own professional life and how I did and didn't respond to it,
it really forces me to look at the liberalism of it really forces me to look at the liberalism of my upbringing and maybe at a frailty of conviction and maybe at the remnants of a naive belief that hate speech should be permitted because after all, it's going to be drowned out by the meritocracy of ideas.
Now, a lot of responses to early formations of fascism, I think, are about education.
And whether and when a person runs into people who know the traditions of anti-fascism, which offer an historically informed analysis, Briefly put, and for this I have to thank Mark Bray.
He's the author of Antifa, the anti-fascist handbook.
This was published in 2017, the same year I went to the lecture, so I could have been reading that.
He says that anti-fascism rejects the classical liberal idea that all speech should be protected.
Firstly, that idea is disingenuous because governments already restrict all kinds of speech, and the ability to make one's voice heard is just not equal in society.
This marketplace of ideas is as much of a disaster for the vulnerable as capitalism itself is.
The free exchange of ideas in capitalism does not lead to truth or social justice.
On the contrary, fascism thrives in open debate.
So, what do anti-fascists do when they hear it?
And I'm not talking about in the pub, you know, hearing fascist ideas from a friend, or, you know, hearing fascist ideas in sort of casual interchanges.
But what do they do when they hear fascist ideas clearly meant to organize and recruit?
When they hear speeches?
When they hear people at a podium?
When they see people on a soapbox?
They counter-organize towards a strategy for effectively disrupting that speech.
But I didn't do that in 2017. I didn't know how to do that.
And so in this essay, I'm going to explore the reasons why.
And what those reasons are, are a series of kind of defensive postures and feelings and ways of protecting myself against what I think is really a necessary conflict.
And they're going to be interwoven throughout what follows.
But here's the summary.
So number one.
My first impression of Jordan Peterson was that he was laughably absurd.
He made me guffaw.
And that's not an effective reaction.
Because fascists don't make sense.
Their disinformation can be zany.
But that doesn't mean they're funny.
And being ironic about their absurdity will not protect vulnerable people from violence.
Secondly, when I spent more time in his material and the discourse around him, I felt Peterson could effectively poke at the vulnerability of leftist self-reflection.
He consistently claims that it's leftists who have authoritarian psychologies.
Now, this can be a legitimate thing to examine in psychotherapy, but if it becomes a political attack, which is all it can be because he's not your damned therapist, it's bullshit.
Thirdly, I went to see him in person at that crowded lecture, and I assessed him first through a capitalist lens.
Wow, I thought, how much money is he making?
Would my content ever be so popular?
So, that one is pretty shameful, I have to say.
Number four, also in person, I limited my view of him to what I was familiar with from my cult journalism.
This is a high-demand, culty, charismatic leader, and in that framework, it was safer to me than saying, Here's a powerful political actor in what is becoming an international fascist movement.
And I persisted in this narrow view even after he showed explicit involvement in the political machinery that's now taken over the US. And lastly, my instincts in general were to intellectualize and to debunk, as opposed to yell and organize and disrupt.
And maybe to summarize these points before I start my story, I'm going to thank Kwame Touré, also known as Stokely Carmichael, who in his 1968 article, Pitfalls of Liberalism, said the following, I think the biggest problem with a white liberal in America, and perhaps the liberal around the world, is that his primary task is to stop confrontation, stop conflicts, not to redress grievances, but to stop confrontation.
And this is very clear.
It must become very, very clear in all our minds.
Because once we see what the primary task of the liberal is, then we can see the necessity of not wasting time with him.
His primary role is to stop confrontation.
Because the liberal assumes a priori that a confrontation So, why did I ride my bike downtown to the Isabel Bader Theatre that June night with the Magnolias exploding with colour and perfume?
It's because in June of 2017, Jordan Peterson was fresh off of his appearance at the Canadian Senate, where he had been invited to give his melted opinions of Bill C-16, which proposed to amend the Charter of Rights to include trans people as a which proposed to amend the Charter of Rights to include trans people as a class protected against So I wanted to see what was up with this freak.
The bill made reference to respecting pronouns, and it suggested that continued and deliberate pronoun misuse...
Now, Peterson read that, and then he freaked out about his personal rights, and he wrote in the National Post a column channeling William Lind called The Right to be Politically Incorrect.
Okay, a production note here.
I've taken a few runs at recording this because I find settling into the right tone a real challenge.
And in prior takes, I did Peterson's Kermit voice.
Which I'm pretty good at, but I'm not doing it in this final cut because I think it leans into that defensiveness of humor.
So I'm going to read this straight.
Quote, First, I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words Xi and Jure.
These words are at the vanguard of a postmodern, radical leftist ideology that I detest.
And which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
So he really wrote that, and the National Post really published it.
So just imagine this.
Some non-binary kid in Jordan Peterson's undergrad psych class, experimenting with their self-identity during a formative time, How threatening is that?
Now, in these three sentences, we also have the full contradiction of the scapegoat logic.
How the scapegoat must always be weak and disgusting, but also powerful and dangerous.
And in the first sentence, the pronouns are trendy and artificial.
In other words, silly and undignified.
But then wait, what's that?
They're also murderous?
It's exactly like saying black men are lazy and incompetent, but also vicious and virile predators.
Or it's like Jews who are strangely both parasitic and disease-ridden, but also elite vampires of capital controlling the world.
So, Jordan, are your undergrads with purple hair just silly?
Or are they murderous?
And which one are you?
I remember reading those sentences and bursting out in laughter.
And this is my point about the defensiveness of laughing it off.
Because thinking, this guy can't be serious, that can lead into a mistake.
It can be a little bit self-centered.
He sounds dead serious to a lot of people.
And if you actually visualize that, it's not funny at all.
Got him invited to a Senate hearing, probably by some politician who didn't know or care that conflating trans people and Marxism with social and moral pollution was what the OG brown shirt motivation was in May of 1933 when the Nazis burned the Institute of Sexology to the ground in Berlin.
Now, Peterson's views on trans rights made him the darling of Canada's rebel media, a little bit like Breitbart News in the States.
He claimed that a $400,000 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant was denied him in 2017 because of his political views.
But there's no way to know whether that's true.
I mean, maybe he just sucks at his job and he's submitted a garbage proposal.
After all, he thinks climate science is wrong.
Like, why would he get any grant in the sciences?
And when he complained about it, Rebel News set up a GoFundMe Jordan campaign that quickly raised $250,000, but also plugged him into the cash streams of the North American alt-right.
By the summer of 2017, when I saw him, He was headlining conservative roundtables, shoulder to shoulder, with a whole crowd of ghouls, including Proud Boys founder Gavin McGinnis.
Now, a banal caveat here is that guilt by association is not guilt, and that you're not always the company you keep, because, of course, Peterson might have had no idea that McGinnis was gaining fame at exactly that time for openly calling for street violence against leftists.
In 2016, and this is in an episode of his podcast that Peterson once guested on, McInnis said, we will kill you.
That's the Proud Boys in a nutshell.
We will kill you.
McInnis described violence as a really effective way to solve problems, and at a New York University speech in February of 2017, he said, violence doesn't feel good.
Justified violence feels great, and fighting solves everything.
I want violence.
I want punching in the face.
That was Gavin McGinnis.
That was the majority of his shtick.
Okay, back to that lecture.
I filed in with a buzzy, anxious crowd.
It was about 70% men, 90% white.
Toronto at large is half white and half black and brown, but at U of T, a full 60% of the student body is South Asian, so this was not a representative audience.
Now, what about the money?
$35 a head, the venue was sold out, the capacity was $500.
That's $17,500 taken in at the door on a regular Tuesday night.
And these lectures came in series of six or ten, I think, and they recurred seasonally.
And the college, I'm imagining, gave Peterson a faculty rental rate.
And he might have paid the videographer that I saw there if she wasn't a volunteer, because these are lectures that would go up onto YouTube immediately afterwards.
In 2018, he told a French journalist he was making about $400,000 a month from Patreon, lectures, and book sales.
And at that point, he was still tenured at U of T, where the average salary is around $300,000 a year.
So you do the math on all of that, and it's $425,000 per month and full professor's benefits at Canada's top university.
So how hard done by he was, how stifled in speech and freedom of expression.
But here's my point about wasting time thinking through a capitalist lens, because I remember doing the math in my head that night and thinking, wow, what a player.
I didn't think Jordan Peterson is heading into lunch with oligarchs and autocrats territory.
I wasn't thinking about him as a political actor.
I was somewhat vainly thinking about him as someone with whom I'm in competition with as a writer.
I literally thought, how did he do that?
Would my content ever be so lucrative?
And given his content, that's a pretty shameful place to start because, of course, he stands to make bank at the intellectual service of heterocapitalism.
The status quo is Jordan Peterson's ATM. This is just a personality cult defensive maneuver.
When he bounded onto the stage in his joker suit 20 minutes late, the crowd leapt to their feet, cheering, and surged towards him in a swoon.
The guy next to me screamed, there he is, there he is, over the roar.
It was like a rock concert.
And Peterson dropped into his trance monologue, and the crowd was entranced.
And he went on and on and on for two and a half hours.
Now, I've described this before.
I'm going to ping it again for new listeners.
For Jordan Peterson, lecturing is a ritual experience.
We see this in a lot of the charismatics that we cover.
He's extroverted but also lost within himself.
And this is mirrored in his body language, where he hunches forward and he gazes downward.
And there's this endless oral chin touching while he's going on in these loopy run-on sentences that sometimes move forward and sometimes fold back in on themselves.
You can feel watching him that speech itself is a way of masturbating out his core theme of harmonizing chaos and order in such a way that order prevails through a tortured battle for at least as long as he's talking.
As if talking...
Now, the lecture was supposed to be about the Jungian symbolism of ancient floods.
But he didn't cover any of that, except for a few begrudging references to floods in ancient Mesopotamian literature.
This was in the last ten minutes.
After he'd already gone over time by about a half an hour, he gave these really lazy citations from, you know, the old standards like Mircea Iliati on a single impossible-to-read slide projected behind him.
And then during the Q&A, which stretched on for another hour, the frat boys and tech bros lined up at the mics 20 deep.
No one asked him about Mesopotamia because who gives a shit?
They lined up.
To lob him softballs about postmodern neo-Marxism and whether feminism had gone too far, and to offer him tech support help on his McCarthyite project of identifying woke professors and courses on campus and exposing their corruption so that he could drive down their enrollment.
Crowding towards the men's room afterwards, I felt something a little bit more aggro, a little bit more brown-shirty.
The guys were all...
Cut from the same cloth.
They all looked like they'd just come from the gym.
So I waited out the urinal line, and then I circled back up the stairs, and when I came out, I found Peterson surrounded by at least 200 acolytes, staggered on the stones as if at the center of an improv amphitheater.
The entire campus was his natural lectern, so why should he stop?
Now, at this point, the deference of the crowd was up close and personal.
He absorbed every dewy-eyed question into his feedback loop.
He made lingering and deep eye contact with some of the women in the crowd.
One in particular stood right in front of him.
She was a foot shorter than him and gazed up into his eyes.
Evidently, she'd asked a personal psychology question, so of course he held court on the matter, talking with equal parts urgency and vagueness about how she could overcome her noble struggles and surrender to her role in the order of things.
And the inner circle seemed to think he was speaking to each of them privately.
So I stood quietly on the outer circle, watching him go on and on.
I thought deep thoughts.
I was trying to search for patterns in what I was seeing.
Sometimes my eyes drifted up to watch the June bugs swarm under the street lamps.
I was familiar with this vibe, with the charismatic constellation, with the whole scene.
My experience in journalism was in cults, and at that time, that's where my brain went.
Peterson had all the hallmarks of a high-demand group leader.
Logaria, specialized jargon, self-sealing arguments, a hundred percent one-way speech in which every question he's asked is just a tripwire for another monologue that might be completely unrelated and yet mesmerizes the listener.
So, my journalism brain settled into a comfortable angle.
If I dug into this crowd and its rhythms, I would probably find an inner circle of yes-men and women.
And then I would find and make an alliance with a whistleblower.
I'd find unpaid labor, slavish devotion, endless mystique surrounding the leader, endlessly crossed boundaries, and endless excuses for his contradictions, failures, and cruelty.
And all of it is plausible.
I'm sure I would have done initial interviews and taken it to an editor at the Walrus or the Star and gotten the assignment on the cult of Jordan Peterson.
I would have collected the data and supported my angle, and there would have been something myopic about that framework.
As well-written as it would have been, I would have missed the forest for the trees.
Because at this point, with about eight years of cult journalism in my rearview mirror, I have a theory about its main vulnerability.
By fetishizing the interpersonal dynamics of a relatively small group, it's very easy to lose the larger context and impact, especially when those dynamics of exploitation and control are common within the broader system of capitalism.
Studying cults is a really good way of isolating social problems as seeming aberrations within an otherwise normally functioning culture.
But that's not accurate.
Cults are really just hyper-concentrated and volatile forms of capitalism.
And when journalism and punditry and capitalist societies focus on cults as aberrations, it helps the culture absolve itself.
And this is the worst outcome, I think, of Steve Hassan's rhetoric on the cult of Trump.
Because it can really make liberals think that Trump is categorically different from other capitalist leaders.
He's just more intense.
And that's a big part of what fascism is.
An intensification of capitalist irrationality.
Further, the study of cults has been plagued by a commitment to apolitical neutrality.
The content of a cult, the experts say, is immaterial to its social function.
Right-wing and left-wing cults operate in the same way, they say.
There's a kind of horseshoe theory reasoning to this, that the extremes on both ends are equal, yada yada.
But what's missing from that is an analysis of the values and outcomes that I think are now much more clear than they ever have been.
Cultic dynamics on the right easily transition into social and political movements.
But where, in the global north, since the end of World War II, have we seen a left-wing personality cult become or feed into a populist political movement that has attained actual power?
Paris 1968?
For two weeks?
Occupy Wall Street?
It just doesn't happen.
But these dynamics are standard on the right.
Listeners might remember us covering the Great Awakening Tour circa 2022 to 2024. Dozens of reactionary influencers who built their businesses on cultic models, cultic fandoms on social media.
They're assembled together by the promoter Clay Clark, and they hit arenas all over the country as the MAGA train got longer.
There's nothing comparable on the left.
So I stood there watching Jordan Peterson and quarantining him off in my head as some kind of cult freak who, like Keith Raniere, would cause damage in a limited radius.
And if I wrote about it, I would be very smart.
And that was safer than looking at him.
And seeing a right-wing, fringe politician on a soapbox, shouting his way towards the center.
There was something about how he was speaking to that young woman that was disquieting to me, something I'd picked up from videos as well.
Clearly, he was able to affect his psychologist position at will and make the individuals of a mob feel like individuals engaged in self-reflection.
And there was one piece of that that gave me legitimate pause.
Peterson has this shtick about how those who want to change the world, even for the better, are not to be trusted.
They too can have authoritarian tendencies.
Well, of course they can.
And in this, he actually owes a debt to leftist thinkers he hates, like Michel Foucault, who described the inner fascist.
Whose personality destroys all solidarity with a relentless need to control.
Foucault called leftists who did this, quote, the political ascetics, the sad militants, the terrorists of theory.
So, listen to that, Jordan.
Eat your heart out.
But in holding up his broken mirror...
I think Peterson gave a lot of leftists pause and maybe even red-pilled some of us to the point of defection.
Part of this psychological assault is to reduce every political value and objective on the left to delusion or frailty performed to replace the proper function of religion.
Leftists, Peterson says, worship at the church of wokeness.
They indulge the ornate but useless sacraments of social justice.
They are children, and they need order restored in their lives.
And so there's no universe in which Peterson or his crowd describes their opponents as having material and social values derived from lived experience, rational decisions, or their own education.
We must have all arrived at positions like anti-racism or intersectionality or decolonization through our psychological hang-ups, unprocessed guilt or teenage rage at the father or not being able to keep our rooms clean.
So, how many of us bought this?
I mean, not intellectually, but in terms of how it provoked us to respond.
Is this a playbook that made you feel gross or demoralized?
If Peterson or someone like him told you that your rage at injustice was a psychological weakness, a sign of hysteria, did you have to waste time thinking about whether this horseshit was true?
I believe it gave me pause and impeded me from taking direct action.
It's a kind of rhetoric that can make leftists check themselves because we just love self-criticism as this essay shows.
And in that self-reflective pause, reactionaries run the board.
Fascist rhetoric can put the leftist on a psychological back foot.
It can weaponize self-reflection and empathy against us as weakness.
Now, it was only later after I did a bunch more reading that I learned that Jordan Peterson had always wanted to be a political leader.
He actually ran for a leadership position in Alberta's Socialist New Democratic Party in 1976 at the age of 14. There's an old picture of him in the paper standing in the exact same posture, same annoying head tilt, quoted as saying, I won't be happy until I'm elected prime minister.
Now, he's described falling out with the socialists not long after that.
He cites interpersonal stuff and also the impression that the leftists around him were hypocritical elites, unconcerned for working people.
And he might have been right about that.
Movements are filled with assholes.
And he could have taken that to therapy.
But the reactionary arc was apparently easier for him.
And by the time I was in his lecture in 2017, he was considering a run for the premiership of our province, leading the Tories.
Now, he didn't ultimately go for it, but he was crucial in raising the profile of the arch-Catholic leadership candidate Tanya Granik-Allen, who was running on one...
She wanted to rescind the recently updated Ontario Public School sex ed curriculum.
Now, this new curriculum had replaced the pre-digital, pre-gay marriage, pre-trans awareness version that was more than two decades old.
This new program was thoroughly researched, it was vetted by top educators in the province, and it was championed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, also known as OISE. It addressed crucial material like consent, birth control, sexual orientation, and online safety.
Peterson spent a lot of 2018 railing against this curriculum.
He called its architect, Premier Kathleen Wynne, who just happened to be a lesbian, center-left liberal, former education minister, the most dangerous woman in Canada.
This is another absurdism that's not funny.
Now, Allen didn't wind up with enough votes to win, but she did have enough to become the leadership kingmaker and to put Doug Ford into the Premier's office.
And once Ford was in, he owed a debt to the Tradcastle who put him there, and Peterson reminded him of it.
Because in October 2018, Peterson had a secret private meeting with Doug Ford after tweeting for the abolishment of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and OISE. The faster the Ontario Human Rights Commission is abolished, the better, he tweeted.
There isn't a more dangerous organization in Canada, with the possible exception of the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education.
Now here's another, like, whoops, my instinct was to laugh, because I remember reading that tweet and thinking he was absurd.
He was delusional.
What I didn't understand was that this over-the-top rhetoric isn't hysterical.
It's fascist.
He wasn't merely saying he strongly disagreed with the best practices put forth by the Human Rights Commission and OISE. He was saying the organizations on the whole were dangerous.
Now, dangerous in what way?
Peterson is too smart to sound like a full-blown QAnon guy, but he will walk up to the edge of it.
As in this speech in 2017 at the conservative think tank, the Manning Center.
They're not interested at all in education.
They're interested in the indoctrination of people as young as they can get their hands on, so to speak.
Did you hear what he did there?
This is what fascists do.
Turn any debate over policy into a panic over disgust and disease and perversion.
Kids requesting pronoun use are like Marxists ready to murder millions.
So by the time you defend yourself, no, of course the Human Rights Commission isn't dangerous.
Of course little Kalen isn't about to kill you with their pronoun and their furry stuffy.
You've conceded ground.
He's pushed the Overton window so far to the right, you're defending basic empathy as though it has to be first distinguished from pedophilia.
The correct response to OISE is dangerous is not, well, however do you mean, sir, let me list the ways in which the noble people there do noble work.
The correct response is, shut the fuck up, you weirdo fascist.
You are not going to control our children's bodies according to your sick pseudo-religion.
Now, does that sound over the top?
I feel a little bit nutty saying that out loud.
But let's just think about the extreme bullshit that these people have no problem spinning out.
Because this is a war over intellectual territory.
And the question is, who is going to bolt that Overton window down to the floor?
And where is that going to happen?
It's not online.
It's going to happen in that conference or on the street.
It's going to happen with a bullhorn in his ear.
Up to the point at which it's no longer worth it for him to keep speaking.
Because where does it lead?
Peterson always had political ambitions.
He helped Ford get in eight years ago, and now he's boosting the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poiliev, who, barring a miracle, will succeed Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister.
In a January 2nd podcast episode that now has 4.3 million views, they congratulated each other on their Make Canada Great Again views.
We're going to be grateful again, and we're going to inculcate the values of gratitude for our incredible history, build up the country, celebrate what we have in common rather than obsessing about what divides us.
focusing on the shared values, That make us all Canadian.
And I think in so doing, we can...
And by the way, put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted.
Well, invented even.
Invented in many ways.
When I moved to Toronto, it was as race-blind as any country, as any city could be.
Right.
Right.
And that's flipped.
And it's flipped because of that obsessive concern with race.
That was something we 100% did not need in Canada.
We basically, what would you say, imported and invented racism in Canada.
As a consequence of policy.
So here we are.
Trump has initiated a fascist regime of terror against immigrants, trans people, leftists, and the climate.
Purging the government of anyone who won't lick his golf shoes, throwing around language that sounds like it popped out of a Peterson chat GPT bot, and it's spreading.
So what is the response?
Thank you again to Mark Bray for the following.
A century of anti-fascist wisdom says, you don't argue with fascists, you fight them.
You don't carefully explain why the anti-racists are not the real racists.
You don't carefully argue that when Peterson moved to one of the whitest neighborhoods in Toronto in 1998, it was only colorblind because of historical and financial segregation.
You don't explain that the concept of racism was not invented because Canada was actually founded on the genocide of First Nations peoples.
They are not making rational arguments and they don't care about history or the truth.
They are exercising power through propaganda.
Liberalism's commitment to free speech in the marketplace of ideas has not slowed this down at all.
Has it accelerated it?
It's possible.
I mean, after all, debating fascism teaches the algorithms to find more fascism to debate.
Debating fascism can become its own industry.
Does discourse feed the beast?
Or does disruption send it running away?
And is there a slippery slope in which disrupting any speech, let's say with bullhorns or DDS attacks, will inevitably lead to the suppression of all speech?
Anti-fascists argue that this isn't true.
It's not something to worry about.
They point out that their targets are clear and that they have no history in suppressing non-fascist viewpoints.
The post-war history of antifascism in general is that it's responsive and crisis-driven.
Antifa groups assemble in response to fascist threats and generally dissolve when the threats recede.
Can we point to an antifascist movement, I ask again, in the post-war period that has taken and maintained power?
We just can't.
I mean, that poses its own organizational problem of continuity, especially if folks are concerned about electoral organizing, but that's a separate challenge.
Now, I'm not fooling myself with some fantasy that bringing a bullhorn to that lecture would have been like drowning baby Adolf Hitler in a bathtub.
Or that I could have stopped Jordan Peterson at a single lecture in 2017, or that if I had, that that would have changed the course of history.
Acting on anti-fascist tradition is a lot more rigorous than that.
It means organizing a group.
It means planning out regular disruptions that inspire other disruptions.
And it means losing and not being successful and never, ever stopping.
And I think it would also mean not caring that acting with passion would validate Peterson's smug caricature of leftists as hysterical or emotionally incontinent.
Because who actually is whipping up hateful emotions to begin with, pretending to engage in rational debate?
The goal would be to reverse the appearance of legitimacy.
To turn the tide on the violent lies that the liberal psyche believes it can reason with in open debate.
So, to close, I just have to say I'm a little bit shocked and a little ashamed that this is only sinking in for me now, but I guess it's better late than never.
