The Disgracing of Jordan Peterson

From renegade intellectual to establishment enforcer

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Jordan Peterson has made himself a topic of discussion recently, becoming the latest member of the Zionist alt-media sphere to try and talk sense into Joe Rogan. Rogan has apparently created a crisis for Peterson’s clique by platforming libertarian critiques of US foreign policy and a historian with the same views on WW2 as Pat Buchanan.

Douglas Murray had warned Rogan that while critics of Israel and US foreign policy might sound reasonable, they are really charlatans taking advantage of people’s ignorance on these topics, and should be passed over in favour of established experts. Peterson now warned Joe that the problem is even more serious: critics of Israel are psychopaths who are taking advantage of his platform for their malevolent ends. How to identify these people? Presumably just avoid platforming anything you wouldn’t find on the Daily Wire.

Peterson explained how his latest research is focused on how dark personality types are drawn to the radical right, specifically anti-Semitism:

I’ve been watching these right-wing… they’re not right-wing… these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that’s cloaked in anti-Semitic guise.

To be fair to Dr. Peterson, there is some truth to the problem he is identifying. The basis for most of his statements on this topic is a Swiss study published in 2023, which found a strong correlation between left-wing authoritarianism and dark triad traits. In the words of the authors:

Individuals who strongly endorse anti-hierarchical aggression to overthrow those in power are narcissistic individuals with psychopathic attributes and thus driven by ego-focused motives.

As Peterson noted at the time, the correlations reported in the study are so high that the constructs of antagonistic narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism are practically the same thing. This research was fascinating, not least because it vindicated the observations of many early psychologists who studied how psychopathology manifested in the phenomenon of communism.

I don’t doubt that people drawn to public-facing roles in radical right politics also tend to be “dark personalities” at a far higher rate than the general population. But that’s not what Peterson said, instead claiming this was a problem that could be identified specifically in the movement around “anti-Semitism.” It’s notable that when you read the analysis of why psychopaths and narcissists are drawn to the radical left, it is explained that leftist activism is a socially acceptable way of expressing their malicious tendencies. Under the guise of tolerance and fighting hate, left-wing authoritarians can engage in the most malicious crushing of dissenters and attain real social capital and power. This is obviously not the case with what Peterson considers anti-Semitism, something that still marginalises anyone identified with the label.

Thus, while we might expect the dark personalities to be overrepresented among the movement of “noticers” online, surely we’d be more likely to find them in the more lucrative space of Conservative Inc., ingratiating themselves to a movement that offers a chance at real power and influence. But Peterson doesn’t discuss this, because it’s less convenient to his narrative. Instead, he claims without evidence that the place to find this on the right is among the demographic he demands be silenced. Peterson is now akin to the Soviet regime doctors who used to diagnose dissidents as sufferers of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’.

I’ve been thinking about why I find Peterson’s participation in this struggle session especially wince-inducing, and concluded it’s the astonishing intellectual arrogance he now exudes on every media appearance. I also can’t get away from the feeling, which is shared by others, that this is not really the same man intellectually or emotionally that came to our attention in 2016.

Say what you want about other Israel apologists like Douglas Murray or Ben Shapiro but they could actually debate you on the nuances of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Peterson can’t even pretend to have deep knowledge of the conflict, but this hasn’t stopped him joining in on the policing operation against anti-Israel voices on the right.

This is just the latest chapter since his switch to becoming a political commentator where he has displayed astonishing arrogance that is now starting to discredit him even to many of his followers.

Three Faces of Jordan

Maybe, like other acts that jumped the shark, it makes sense to break down Peterson’s public career into distinct periods. The first period would be where his focus was exclusively on psychology, when he published Maps of Meaning and had a popular lecture series on related topics that found an audience on YouTube in the early 2000s. Peterson’s combination of Jungian psychoanalysis with clinical psychology, and his applying these disciplines to popular media and a philosophy of individual self-actualisation earned him a following outside his discipline, especially among young men. But it was modest fame compared to the international stardom that would come later.

The second period of the public Peterson came with his rise to international prominence in 2016. Peterson became a public critic of Canada’s Bill C-16, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of “gender identity”, making the use of “preferred pronouns” compelled speech. For a couple of years, Peterson was a pretty interesting, independent commentator. Although he was wedded to a quintessentially Boomer kind of basic liberalism, his critiques of leftism and the psychology of its activists bolstered a movement of general reaction to the excesses of wokeism in the 2010s. Peterson actually being pretty establishment in his politics wasn’t an issue as long as his principled belief in individual liberty was directed at encroaching leftist tyranny.

Over time though, Peterson became more political, and began to tailor his message to fit the Reaganite consensus that has long dominated conservative politics in the United States, the source of his largest audience. Jordan began to add an economic element to his critique of the left. The “postmodern neo-Marxists” were not just evil for deconstructing man’s sources of meaning and undermining masculine virtue, they also failed to understand the wisdom of free market economics. Peterson began to sound more like traditional Reaganite favourites Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell as he devoted more of his media appearances defending the inequalities of neoliberalism.

In 2019, Peterson showed up to a debate with the world's most famous Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek admitting that his sole preparation was skimming the Communist Manifesto in the taxi that brought him there. Peterson seemed to have little understanding of the fundamentals of Marxist theory or how exactly these ideas shaped the New Left, and when pressed, struggled to identify any examples of the postmodern neo-Marxists he warns about. It was an early example of Peterson’s arrogance and intellectual carelessness when it came to approaching political theory, in what may have been the most watched debate on that subject ever.

Golem Peterson

Peterson’s final phase could be called ‘Golem Peterson,’ after the Jewish myth of a soulless clay figure animated to serve its creator’s will — it increasingly seems as if we are watching a shadow of the professor whose mission is entirely directed by Zionist interests. The beginning of this coincides with a time when Peterson suffered an extreme addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilisers. This addiction became so extreme that Peterson’s family sought emergency detox treatment in Russia, where Peterson spent nine days in a medically induced coma in 2019.

On waking, Jordan had experienced neurological damage and lost the ability to perform basic functions like walking and writing, leading to a months-long rehabilitation process. When Peterson returned to the spotlight and the details of his brush with death in an unnamed Moscow clinic were revealed, people were bewildered. As one article at the time noted:

The news was met with bafflement by doctors and laypeople alike. What was Peterson doing in a drug-induced coma in Russia? Based on interviews with medical professionals and a close reading of various statements that Mikhaila and Peterson himself have made on podcasts and social media, it is clear that Peterson ended up in Russia after an extended battle to wean himself off clonazepam. And it seems likely that Peterson, a self-proclaimed man of science, succumbed to the lure of a quack treatment—with devastating consequences.

I think there has been an observable decline in Peterson’s mental sharpness and depth of output since these events. I generally prefer to keep things above the belt and argue ideas instead of speculating about people’s mental state like this, but then Peterson's entire argument is that his critics and opponents are all psychologically disordered.

Many of Peterson’s followers have observed that he has become extremely emotionally reactive in recent years. It is now a popular meme that Peterson seemingly cries in every interview, with mundane observations often drawing tears.

This period also coincided with Peterson going into a spiral about his online critics— the malevolent “troll demons”. Peterson has become extremely sensitive to any criticism or disagreement, which he can never interpret as anything but the wretched spewings of irrationally hateful people. I experienced this sensitivity myself when Peterson went from following me on X to blocking me after I politely suggested it might be more productive to debate other political commentators rather than compare them to rats. It’s a fact that benzodiazepine withdrawal and comas both have well-documented, long term neurological effects. Studies on former benzodiazepine abusers find years of enduring symptoms like anxiety, cognitive deficits and, perhaps most relevant to the above, emotional inhibition.

It’s also in this later phase of his career that Peterson has seemed to take a more mercenary approach to intellectual life. His transformation from principled opponent of woke to Con Inc. mouthpiece was complete when he became an employee of Daily Wire in 2023. Peterson promised a "manifesto" which he expected to revolutionise political discourse for the 21st century, presenting a new brand of conservative politics that could draw on his lifetime of research into human psychology. Jordan Peterson’s “Conservative Manifesto“ actually ended up being reheated Hayekian talking points from 80 years ago about limitations of central planning, which equated “the west” to individual rights and liberty.

This emphasis on methodological individualism in Peterson’s approach to politics often seems paradoxical to new followers of his. Much of Peterson’s popularity with young men came from his warning of the perils of individualism on the human psyche. Peterson wrote in his bestselling 12 Rules for Life that “Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health”. He has long criticised approaches to therapy that search for solutions to people’s problems entirely by focusing on their internal state, overlooking their place in a world of social relations and responsibilities.

Yet Peterson defends all the deracinating trends of modern liberalism. He has made himself a champion of the neoliberal economic package that accelerated the denationalisation trends across the West, gutting national industries in favour of financialisation and rentier-capitalism. He reverts to the “free to choose arguments” of consistent individualists like Friedman, without ever addressing the subsequent decades of decline that Western elites adopting globalisation has brought to people in the West. Even the other Daily Wire presenters have long moved on from market-fundamentalist arguments to a more pragmatic national conservative approach to economic issues.

He is also viciously opposed to critics of multiculturalism, and has stated he views the identitarian right as a more malevolent force than the left. Peterson has never really explained why ethnonationalism or a sense of pride in one’s racial identity is so evil, or why it wouldn’t be a reasonable adaptation to his view of the flourishing human psyche as one embedded in a community of kinship and shared responsibilities. He has also never explained how he can be such a staunch advocate for Jewish identitarianism and nationalism while looking to censor people wishing the same thing for White people. And it’s not like he’s subtle about promoting Zionism.

As soon as Peterson joined Daily Wire, he began to include support for Israel in the package of conservative Western values he was selling his audience. Peterson took trips to Israel alongside his new colleague Ben Shapiro, conducted interviews with Benjamin Netanyahu, and began to show outrage at the mixed response of his audience.

After October 7th, with little knowledge or any signs of serious study of the conflict, Peterson simply appointed himself an authority on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Not only did he refuse to platform anyone with a perspective diverging from the Israeli Likud party, but he used his own expertise to declare that there was no one reasonable or well-intentioned elsewhere. At this point Jordan wasn’t really making arguments anymore, instead lending his reputation and platform to launder the reputation of Zionist leaders to his young Western audience.

The reasonable and expected pushback of anti-Zionist voices wondering why an intellectual they admired for his courage fighting wokeism has chosen to spend his twilight years as a paid propagandist for a Jewish statelet led to Peterson’s current spiral, declaring war on the anti-Semitic troll demons to the point of demanding an end to online anonymity, most recently in his Rogan interview.

I would call this latest episode a new low for Peterson, but this is just off the back of him producing a report on the “extremist” political forces behind use of the phrase “Christ is King”. Peterson produced this report in collaboration with an organisation called the Network Contagion Research Institute, which is a partner of the ADL. The author’s co-principal investigators were Joel Finkelstein, a former research fellow at the ADL Center, and Lee Jussim, a Jewish radical leftist psychologist who specialises in studying “prejudice”, and has a substack newsletter which is mostly be dedicated to the supposed evils of Trumpism. The study warned of things like “implicit hate speech”, which Peterson was happy to sign off on, despite making his name as a voice in politics fighting against the very concept of hate speech.

While writing this, I was reminded of a popular clip from a couple of years ago. In it, Jordan is asked about a film director’s comment that he is "pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community". This draws tears from Peterson, who responds: “I thought the marginalised were supposed to have a voice…people have been after me for a long time because I’ve been speaking to disaffected young men.”

Watching Peterson become another apologist for the establishment is unfortunate, but seeing him now embrace a role as the establishment head dismissing and demanding the marginalisation of the disaffected young men is downright shameful. As Peterson burns more credibility and good will with every appearance, it speaks to the intellectual vacuity and desperation of his Zionist allies that they're leaning so heavily on this man.