Brief: Jordan Peterson’s Shady Billionaire Backers
Julian covers the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. Headlined by Jordan Peterson, featuring Konstantin Kisin, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Jonathan Pageau, and Eric Weinstein, the conference positioned itself as an inspiring cultural gathering focused on reclaiming Western values.
Behind the scenes, a hedge-fund billionaire new media baron, conservative libertarian think tank, shady funding source in Dubai, and an evangelical English aristocrat use the prestige of ARC and its celebrity figureheads to popularize a very specific political, economic, and religious agenda.
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So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
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I'm Julian Walker.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference that happened in London in the middle of last month.
What ideas were on display?
Who was expressing them?
And what may really be going on behind the scenes with the parent organization and key players driving this friendly and inspiring-seeming cultural initiative to restore and preserve the greatness of Western values?
At the end of censorship on Twitter, we finally have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views.
Because of this, other social media companies are now fearful of being too aggressive in their censorship too.
Now, it's true.
We haven't yet won the argument on freedom of speech here in Europe.
I thought the most hilarious example of this was last week, when J.D. Vance gave a speech in Munich in which he criticized European leaders for trying to shut down speech that they don't like.
The reaction?
A German politician stood up and went, This is unacceptable!
The accent was a bit much.
All right.
That's Konstantin Kissen.
He's one of the co-hosts of the heterodox podcast Trigonometry.
And he's speaking at the ARC conference, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
I'll just call it ARC from now on.
It happened in London last month.
And that's what we'll talk about today.
Now, Kissin is often used as a kind of prickly comedian political speaker for these kinds of events.
He's confident, he can be quite witty and eloquent, and comes across as especially funny when preaching to the choir.
And the ARC conference was definitely the choir.
You can tell because he very quickly gets to the culture war topic of Twitter having been subject to authoritarian censorship, which has now thankfully been lifted under Elon Musk's Ownership.
What a victory for free speech.
So Kissin is exercising his free speech to make jokes that sometimes land and sometimes fall flat.
At this conference, it was held in a huge exhibition center on the Royal Victoria Dock, close to the airport in London, the second of its kind.
It drew 4,000 attendees, mostly from Europe, the UK and the US, but also, as one of the speakers reported, a few hundred from Africa and the Middle East.
Participants and speakers are, says the ARC website, thought leaders and change makers committed to shaping a hope-filled vision for the world.
The organization and these events are, to some extent, A big part of the reason we are here,
4,000 of us, is that an obscure Canadian clinical psychologist became such a unique cultural phenomenon that he can help to pull us together like this.
And how did Jordan Peterson get so big?
How did he get so big?
He reminded us of something that human beings have known for millennia.
That if you adopt the attitude that honesty is better than lies, that responsibility is better than blame, and that strength is better than weakness, your life will get better.
applause
And now he sells out sports arenas around the world.
We are a civilization that is waiting to be inspired.
So let's stop listening to the people who want us to fail.
Let's ignore the counsel of our enemies.
Let's open our eyes and see the world as it is.
Our culture is special.
Our civilization is special.
We have built the most free and prosperous societies in the history of humanity, and we are going to keep them that way.
So yes, Jordan Peterson is the star in this particular firmament.
And his appeals to a kind of stoic, conservative, spiritual renewal are the perfect PR for what ARC is really all about.
You started to hear one of the key motifs just there, didn't you?
Western culture and civilization are special and must be preserved and restored.
We will cultivate and nurture an attitude of hope, And optimism, indeed, of positive self-esteem and ignore the criticism of our enemies.
What could possibly go wrong?
Back to Constantine Kissin.
Here he is referencing another talking point that would define the discourse.
At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet.
That if only we could stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe.
This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.
We must never get used to this because it represents a grotesque moral inversion.
The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing.
And at a cultural level, any successful civilization would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good.
What do you imagine happens to civilizations that don't?
So we must say without apology, the solution to climate change can't be poverty.
Ah, so not just cheering on liberal democracy then.
Birth rates must be increased.
And the climate alarmists want us to stop having babies, which is somehow connected to how Western civilization is in danger of being lost.
It all sounds a bit Great Replacement Theory-esque, but maybe I'm overreacting.
The way economics, birth rates, and climate policy get woven together so quickly here kind of shook me a little.
It's disorienting.
At first, it turns out that this is one of the characteristic rhythms of all of the speakers I surveyed.
See if you notice a version of it here.
We're gathering knowing that there is a better story and that the foundations of our civilization are good and solid and worth defending.
We're gathering knowing that there is a pathway up and towards a pro-human, hope-filled...
Optimistic vision of our world.
It is time for us to remember.
We're going to rediscover the values and virtues on which our civilization was built.
The solid ground.
The solid principles.
An ethic based on freedom.
And human dignity.
a culture committed to truth, and a people living with a secure identity grounded by spiritual and philosophical foundations.
Now, that's Philippa Stroud.
Oops, sorry.
I should have said that's Baroness Philippa Stroud.
The racial sovereignty embedded in all of that optimistic humanism and enlightened virtue ethics is hard to miss, even though it's brief.
So, I wonder...
And who is this person exactly?
Well, alongside Jordan Peterson, Stroud is one of the founders of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
She's a conservative member of the House of Lords, which is a bit like being a senator in the U.S., except the House of Lords also has some judicial powers.
And another difference is that members are not actually elected as they would be to the House of Commons.
They are rather appointed by the king on the advice of the prime minister.
So she's got an aristocratic title.
She's a baroness.
She has political influence via an appointment made by the king.
And she's a member of the conservative party.
And also a Pentecostal Christian who believes that homosexuality is caused by demonic possession.
If that's not interesting enough yet, consider that Baroness Stroud says she's been moved by her faith to work helping the poor.
She has, in fact, advocated for the UK taking in more refugee children and for social programs that would provide better care for homeless addicts.
Sounds great.
But according to The Guardian, she also founded a church and night shelter in Bedford that helped homeless addicts and also counseled gay and trans people, several of whom say that they were prayed over in order to cast out the demons that were supposedly causing their gender identity and sexual orientation.
And Stroud's own writing in her book, God's Heart for the Poor, Confirms these attitudes and practices.
Now, here's why I wanted to unpack that a little.
There's nothing overt in Stroud's speech here that references her religion, her beliefs, or indeed her mission in the world that she appears to be devoted to.
Instead, we hear about hope and optimism, Western values and identity.
With just the dog whistle here and there that imply a conservative agenda.
And that's the rhythm I'm talking about, because as it turns out, there are some very specific themes woven through the conference that are dressed up in a lofty but, I think, empty mythopoetic and archetypal language.
And this is what makes Jordan Peterson such a perfect figurehead for this group.
So let's hear from him.
The foundational texts of Western civilization, the biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice predicated on the emergent discovery or realization that the sacrifice most pleasing to God that sets the world right That creates the order that is good,
or very good, is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate.
And the Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form.
And it's no chance occurrence that...
The sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state and the state organized under the divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and
The land to abundance.
Now this is really something to watch, and because you're not seeing it, I'll tell you.
Peterson wanders around the stage in his typical three-piece suit, as if he's either trying to find his way through the rhetorical jazz of each sentence, perhaps you can tell by his delivery that he's sort of pausing and he's thinking as he's speaking.
Or maybe he's trying to access in his brain the memorized speech that he doesn't have notes for.
But there you have it, right?
The foundational texts of Western civilization that tell us about sacrifice are at the heart of all moral and societal order.
The Christian formulation of this mystery of sacrifice is clearly the best one.
Or as Jordan puts it, The arguably ultimate form.
Because that is what has made the West the best.
And that's not circular reasoning at all.
Now, we've done too much about Jordan Peterson over the years on this podcast already.
So I won't belabor unpacking him.
His message is at this point very familiar.
He creates content for subscribers to the ultra-conservative Daily Wire website.
He rose to fame in 2017 based on eloquently mischaracterizing Canadian legislation that added transgender people to human rights law as being protected against discrimination.
And though he's danced around the question of his faith with laughable philosophical sophistry, especially for the first few years in the spotlight, Peterson is clearly a devout Christian who, despite posturing as a proponent of Jungian mythological interpretation,
finds the literal metaphysics of the myth of Jesus powerful enough to sometimes be moved to tears during interviews.
But that may not be such a strong statement, given that he's also cried a bit on TV about the plight of incels who've been so wounded by the dominance of nasty feminists.
But that aside, here he is extolling The Mott version of that Christian faith.
You know that idea of the Mott and the Bailey.
The Bailey is the more extreme statement, and then the Mott is what you retreat to.
So say, no, no, no, I don't mean that.
I just mean this more reasonable-sounding thing.
So the Mott version of the Christian faith is that it's really Judeo-Christian values that have made the West so great, as if the golden rule and basic social principles of human decency, empathy, and fairness are not a naturally arising hallmark.
of so many human cultures.
But he'll retreat from that as a way of saying, well, I'm not going to make any definitive statements about whether or not Jesus was literally the son of God who died for our sins and will rise again.
But it's undeniable that Judeo-Christian values, etc.
Okay, so that's Jordan Peterson.
Let's turn now to the third and final founding member of ARC, Sir Paul Marshall.
He was knighted in 2016 for contributions to education and philanthropy.
Marshall is a billionaire hedge fund manager who's quickly becoming a very significant media baron.
More about that in a moment.
He used to be a big donor to the Liberal Democrat Party in England, and that's the third largest party.
It tends to sit...
Ideologically right between the Conservatives and Labour who really dominate British politics, with a range of positions that both support free markets and government welfare policies.
They've historically been strongly environmentalist and very committed to the EU, which is where Marshall found himself breaking with the Lib Dems in 2015.
Marshall had always been in the most economically liberal faction of the party, and he actually co-authored something called the Orange Book, which emphasizes the importance of competition and choice in solving a range of policy problems.
So we need to stand up for free market capitalism, but we also need to be careful what exactly it is that we are defending.
Ultimately... Free markets only truly prosper in societies where there is a proper shared understanding of virtue and mutual honour.
That is why the City of London prospered for so many years on little more than the ethic of my word is my bond.
Corrupt societies, on the other hand, practice tribalism and cronyism.
Think Somalia or Sicily or Davos.
APPLAUSE
We live in an age of cronyism.
We even have an exclusive venue, an annual conference in the Swiss mountains, where the cronies gather once a year to collude in the most efficient way possible on a global scale.
US corporations spend over $2 billion per annum lobbying in Washington, D.C. European corporations spend over 1 billion euros per annum lobbying in Brussels.
This spending has a high return on investment.
Take Big Pharma.
Big Pharma spends $356 million per annum lobbying in the US.
Pfizer alone spends $11 million.
In 2021, Pfizer made $35 billion of incremental sales and at least $10 billion of incremental profits from the COVID vaccine.
They were granted fast-track authorisation and immunity from all liabilities, just in case there were side effects.
That is what I call lobbying money.
Okay, so that gives you a flavor of Paul Marshall's keynote address.
Free markets only prosper with a proper understanding of virtue and honor.
These people make me laugh, you know, like somehow their ancestors discovered some unique understanding of virtue and honor, which is why they were so powerful and wealthy.
It's actually very childlike.
And then notice the comparison to Somalia.
And one can only imagine he's referring to Sicily's history with organized crime.
Although, Brother Marshall, the mafia are a bunch of amateurs in comparison to the crimes of the British Empire.
But never mind.
Note, too, the big pop he got from the crowd for his conspiratorial joke about Davos and Big Pharma.
I mean, he's right.
Lobbying is out of control, and it is scandalous that it plays such a big role in American politics.
But there's more dog whistles there, right, about COVID, vaccines, side effects.
I'll just note here for anyone who doesn't know that the safety and efficacy testing done for vaccines is so effective.
That side effects are usually rare, temporary, and much less dangerous than the conditions one is being vaccinated to protect against.
But because of misguided anti-vax activism, leading to expensive lawsuits based on shoddy science, vaccine manufacturers in the 80s were ready to stop production because it wasn't worth it for them.
So to keep life-saving vaccines on the market, government programs were put in place to free manufacturers from that burden by using an excise tax on each vaccine to provide for free legal representation and generous payouts.
And a similar system was set up to deal with COVID vaccine injury claims.
So the red herring about the vaccine companies having been fast-tracked and then indemnified in some scandalous way is utterly fallacious.
The COVID vaccines went through phase three trials with tens of thousands of people.
They were moved to the front of the line in terms of being assessed and going through approval first due to the crisis.
It sounds scary to say that they were rendered immune from accountability if anything went wrong, but this is not new, and it's a way of dealing with a population level of misguided lawsuits.
Contrary to the anti-vax propaganda of people who've now moved into the most powerful positions in medical science in the US, the COVID vaccines were very safe and very effective and are actually amongst the greatest achievements in the history of medicine.
Okay, so put that out of the way now.
Here's one last clip from Marshall.
Woke capitalism is the imposition of a top-down ideology onto the free market system by politically motivated bureaucrats, either from the public or the private sector.
Their ideology is framed through ESG.
Okay, DEI and ESG.
We've heard a lot about DEI lately, but what about that other acronym?
You may know that ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance.
It's a way of evaluating a company's sustainability and ethical impact.
Like, how environmentally responsible are they?
How do they affect the society?
What is the power structure like within their organization?
I mean, really, it sounds like a proper understanding of virtue and honor to me, but not to Paul Marshall.
I mean...
This is essentially a way of looking at whether or not companies are infringing on human rights, engaging in fair labor practices, polluting the environment, and providing transparency about who's at the top of their hierarchy and how much they're paid.
But I guess, for Marshall, the old world notion that my word is my bond is less cumbersome.
Now, remember that I said he was a budding media baron?
Well, stay tuned because next up, I'm going to tell you all about that as well as the parent organization behind all of this.
And then we'll end with the uniquely grandiose conspiracism from one of the guest speakers, Eric Weinstein.
Music
All right, so now we pull back the curtain.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a name that would not be out of place in either a Dickens novel or a dystopian sci-fi movie, was founded in June of 2023 by Paul Marshall, Baroness Stroud, and Jordan Peterson.
The real story, though, is their parent organization, Legatim Institute, which was founded in 2007 in London with funding from the Dubai-based Legatim Group.
Under its owner, Christopher Chandler, he's another billionaire hedge fund manager.
He made his fortune in the 90s and 2000s with his brother by investing in Russia's booming post-Soviet oligarchy.
It looks like the money is channeled through the Legatum Foundation, which is registered in Bermuda and in turn controlled by a company in the Cayman Islands, which I know all sounds totally legit, but...
Transparency Watchdog Group Who Funds You has given them an E, which is their lowest possible rating for transparency.
In 2018, Chandler was accused by a British MP of being a Russian intelligence agent.
He sued the private investigator involved in that case for libel and lost at first, and then tried again and won.
So it appears the evidence was not a slam dunk.
So that's the Legatum Institute.
It turns out that from 2016 to 2023, Philippa Stroud, the same baroness we've been talking about, was the CEO of Legatum Institute until she left that position to run ARC.
And the owner of Legatum, Christopher Chandler, is also on ARC's advisory board.
Legatum Institute is a think tank.
And they say their mission is to educate the public on policy issues and thereby lift people from poverty to prosperity.
They have been criticized for their very active association with Brexit and for publishing misleading and biased analysis about the free trade benefits of the UK leaving the EU.
ARK has just two shareholders, Legatum Ventures and Sir Paul Marshall.
I mentioned before that Marshall is a budding media baron.
Let's talk about that.
He owns three conservative news outlets in Britain.
The Spectator, which is the oldest magazine publication in the world.
Unheard, which is a new media culture war website that features articles and podcasts that are also published as YouTube videos.
And then the newest venture, GB News.
which is a TV and radio news channel founded in 2021.
GB News has been criticized as conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, and demonizing of trans people, and has argued against COVID quarantine measures.
Paul Marshall, as it turns out, has also reached across the pond to become an investor in the $100 million-valued Barry Weiss project, The Free Press.
Now, an investigation by DeSmog found that one in three GB News presenters had spread climate denialism and more than half had attacked climate change measures in their broadcasts, which makes sense because Paul Marshall's hedge fund owns shares worth over $2 billion in fossil fuel companies.
These shares have soared in value since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Anchors have been criticized for biased and false reporting on that topic as well.
The other major shareholder of GB News?
Why? Dubai-based Legatum Group.
The Guardian has observed that GB News seems uninterested in turning a profit, instead losing as many as $40 million a year while effectively donating to right-wing politicians by serving as their platform of choice.
So as you can tell, there's a whole lot here.
But suffice it to say that having seen a little of what's going on backstage behind the scenes of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, it should come as no surprise that both of their large conferences have featured climate.
denialist speakers, including the hugely controversial scientist, author, and documentary filmmaker Bjorn Lomborg, who's part of the ARC Advisory Board
Lomborg has been formally accused of scientific dishonesty by a group of environmental scientists who reviewed his work and other scientists who have criticized his cherry-picking and low scientific accuracy.
see.
So these are the people who have handpicked Jordan Peterson to be the figurehead of a cultural organization that leans into optimism, freedom, spiritual values, and the message of saving Western civilization while gently but persistently emphasizing the importance of capitalism,
European identity, increasing birth rates, and turning away from fear-mongering about overpopulation, environmental regulations, and the bugaboos of DEI and ESG.
We don't have time to go into all of it, but several of the panel discussions at this conference featured Peterson's sidekick, the very odd, ultra-conservative Joseph Campbell wannabe, Jonathan Pajot, if you come across this guy.
As well as the Coptic Archbishop of London and then recent Christian convert and former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
David Brooks also spoke with his topic being how secular humanism has failed.
And the former president of Hungary, Katalin Novak, spoke about how that country is turning around its demographic crisis.
And she actually starts off that talk by inviting anyone with 10 or more children to stand up and then having the crowd of 4,000 applaud them, presumably for doing their part to make sure the immigrants don't
overrun Europe.
Now, you may be listening to all of this and thinking, yeah, so what?
Conservatives are going to conservative.
It's predictable.
But I look at a group like ARK.
As emblematic of how the worst political actors are winning the culture war.
And by winning the culture war, they're winning elections.
And they're doing this by very effectively drawing curious people into online content and alternative news sources and conferences like this, which give the appearance of being about And
I really want to underline this.
is not like one of the evangelical, red-pilled, QAnon-friendly kind of traveling roadshows that we have in the U.S. This has a completely different intellectual, spiritual,
respectable, button-down quality to it.
And that brings me to Eric Weinstein.
He's the brother of Dark Horse podcast co-host...
Brett Weinstein, with whom you may be more familiar.
Like Brett, but even more so, Eric believes he's been cheated out of a Nobel Prize.
In his case, for mathematical physics.
Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Peter Thiel's hedge fund.
The billionaire hedge fund people are never far away.
Amongst critics like ourselves, and Decoding the Gurus, for example, Eric is best known for his grandiosity, his non-sequiturs, and his failed attempts to popularize conspiratorial acronyms on Twitter, like the DISC, D-I-S-C,
which stands for the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, and the GIN, G-I-N, which stands for the Gated Institutional Complex.
He doesn't get into any of those this time because they haven't caught on, but one phrase he did coin is the intellectual dark web for describing The group of people that he was actually kind of just on the outskirts of, but that one landed and stuck.
Anyway, here are some highlights from Eric Weinstein.
I want to begin with going back to the Bible.
I am your DEI speaker.
As an atheist Jew progressive from the United States, I'm sort of slightly askew.
But what I want to do is I want to go back to the Bible and Isaiah, which is at the end of Bob Dylan's famous All Along the Watchtower.
And if you go to the King James Version, where it says, It's two riders that are approaching, as the song says.
And what did they come with?
They come with news of the fall of Babylon.
Now the question is, is peace linked to gelding, to emasculation, to devitalization?
Creativity, innovation, and vitality is inseparable from violence.
Violence is not necessarily a bad thing.
When it comes to masculine traits, people have a very hard time finding any masculine traits that aren't also feminine traits to say a positive thing about, except apparently we are able to pee standing up.
I think that another positive trait of men is that they can control their violence and that violence can be used for protection and that violence can be used for creativity.
I want to talk about a very difficult subject, and that is that the concept of actual physical emasculation has a rich history Going well into the 20th century, and in fact, into the 21st century.
One of the reasons that we've been deranged by the trans discussion is that the trans discussion is about devitalization.
And it is a recurrent theme that authoritarian regimes attack the reproductive rights of their citizens.
And whether this is China, in which the last eunuch died in the 90s, rather astounding.
Whether we have, in Italy, the last castrato, who was actually recorded, and you can listen to him sing.
Not a very good castrato, I might add.
Or Sanjay Gandhi, who triggered, in part, the reaction in India.
Do we have Indians in the audience?
Very disappointing.
I would say to them, total revolution is now the slogan.
That is how angry people were and how violent they became because of sterilization camps that were practiced in the 1970s.
And I have this quote from Elon Musk.
Because I think what you have to assume is that when you go to war, one of the great terrors...
Oh, he's so close with that observation about authoritarian regimes attacking reproductive rights,
but then he just goes off the rails.
Into bizarre trans panic and Elon Musk bootlicking.
While he's licking, he's shedding tears because he's so sad for Elon Musk.
Okay, everyone.
Thank you for listening.
I know this is not fun or hopeful.
I was hoping that last set of excerpts might make you laugh a little, but it's also pretty grim.
But I do think it's really important to keep tracking this phenomenon because it's relatively new.
It's very influential and effective and deliberate.
There's a grab bag of issues like being anti-immigrant, which is dressed up as being pro-human and increasing the birth rate and addressing the demographic crisis.
This is white replacement theory by any other name.
By the same token, it is It's also anti-business regulation and anti-EU because the rules and regulations of the European Union get in the way of advancing prosperity.
And guess what?
So, too, do climate measures.
Any kind of ESG regulations, any kind of DEI, all of that is part of the woke imposition on big business.
Behind all of this are hedge fund billionaires who are heavily leveraged in fossil fuels and are becoming media tycoons like Paul Marshall, either buying up or investing in or funding new media organizations that then take That's
very appealing to a lot of people.
And I would guess there's a significant percentage who go into it not actually realizing what they're signing up for.
And I'm just going to go ahead and say it in that way.
It actually reminds me of deceptive.
Cult Recruitment.
Tactics that we've seen from big organizations that sell big weekend experiences where you can bond with a group of people and have meaningful experiences together.
You know, the ARC conference even featured some musical performance and some spoken word poetry performances that they would then put up on their YouTube channel as the moment that brought 4,000 people to tears or the stunning musical beauty of this particular performer,
that sort of thing.
So here you are.
With like-minded people gathering in this huge auditorium and seeing inspiring people talk about meaningful cultural and spiritual values in a way that gives you a sense of mission and purpose and community and a new vocabulary to talk about hope and optimism.
And yet underneath it all is the exact agenda that I've just been outlining.
Those are my thoughts on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
