Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: What My Late Mom Would Have Thought About Jordan Peterson

Jan. 5, 2026 - Conspirituality

04:54

Bonus Sample: What My Late Mom Would Have Thought About Jordan Peterson

Matthew reflects on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death and revisits how her life, trauma, and values helped him understand the appeal—and fatal flaw—of Jordan Peterson’s worldview. Toughness can be an expression of love without becoming a politics of cruelty. Show Notes 33: Manipulating the Hero’s Journey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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	Hey everyone, this is Conspirituality where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
	I'm Matthew Remsky.
	You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
	The podcast is on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
	And you can also find me on YouTube and TikTok at anti-fascistdad.
	Today I've got a short episode for you in the bonus category called What My Late Mom Would Have Thought About Jordan Peterson.
	First of all, it's shocking to me that it's been five years since my mom died, December 28th, 2020, still at peak COVID time.
	On January 7th, 2021, we published an episode together called Manipulating the Hero's Journey.
	This was our 33rd episode.
	We're about at 290 now.
	And onto the end of it, I tacked a reflection on my mother dying at home in hospice the previous week.
	Now, a lot of our listeners back then wrote very kind notes to me about it.
	And part of what I want to do today is follow up for those folks, if they're still out there.
	And if you didn't catch the original, I'll post that in the notes.
	Now, needless to say, this was an emotional time.
	And I wanted to mark the occasion, but of course, I was processing a lot of things.
	So I did the avoidant thing and I settled on something germane to the podcast beat, which was how this experience of home hospice reshaped my understanding of conspiratuality, care, and institutional trust.
	Because being able to nurse my mom at home was a privilege that was enabled by Canada's public health system.
	You know, our proximity to a very good hospice care center and the fact that my father and I could step away from work.
	We had the time to do that.
	And I could see this hospice sort of situation as this rare meeting place between worlds that are often treated as irreconcilable, the institutional, medical, and the intimate, the clinical and the relational.
	We've described conspirituality as a volatile fusion of conspiracy thinking and new age promise, a kind of fear and hope bound together by digital acceleration.
	But the hospice experience was the opposite of that.
	Care workers brought hospital knowledge into our home without erasing our domestic textures and rituals and history.
	At our dining room table, syringes and medications were laid out alongside photo albums, sewing scissors, and folded napkins and half-used teacups.
	Care unfolded slowly through touch and conversation and shared responsibility.
	So the whole thing helped me see how conspirituality exploits a real wound, the split between our need for order and our need for care.
	In the quiet presence of hospice workers, and especially a woman named Rosa, who stood with us as my mother died, that split just went away.
	So that's what I talked about.
	Those were my intellectual thoughts at the time.
	But now it's many years later, and I'm able to say something else about my mom.
	It still relates to our beat because it's about Jordan Peterson and some of the attitudes and affects that we've struggled to understand, as in, like, why are so many people attracted to this guy?
	but it's also more personal.
	And it's been a while in coming.
	And it was also provoked by writing the book that I have coming out with North Atlantic in April about anti-fascism and parenting.
	And I didn't expect to write it all out for that book, but I found myself doing it anyway because it seemed really important.
	And so what I want to do now is just preview that section with you here with some additional notes that aren't in the text.
	You've been listening to a conspiratuality bonus episode sample.
	To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com/slash conspiratuality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
	You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.

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