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Matthew Vaith (0:25)

Hello everybody. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. That is 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 TechnoFash 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 naivetes 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 the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day to day lives of those we serve. Now this shit is a century old. The cartoonification of 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 US 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 Weyrick 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 and cultural Marxism in women's studies programs. I knew what I was hearing. But when it came time for Q and 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. But 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 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 antifascism, which offer an historically informed analysis about how this stuff builds from hate speech to street violence and how it's facilitated by liberal responses. And they know it because they have survived fascism. 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 hearing fascist ideas from a friend or 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, 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, you know, 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 damn 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 U.S. 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 Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, who in his 1968 article Pitfalls of Liberalism, said the I think the biggest problem with the 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 is not going to solve the problem. This, of course, is an incorrect assumption. We know that. So why did I ride my bike downtown to the Isabel Bader Theater that June night with the magnolias exploding with color 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 C16, which proposed to amend the Charter of Rights to include trans people as a class protected against hate speech or harassment. 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 or dead naming of a trans person could constitute a charter violation. 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 G 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, asks to be called by their proper name or by ji. 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. That absurd and unfunny column 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. 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 McGuinness 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, McInnes said, We will kill you. That's the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you. McGinnis 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 bucks taken in at the door on a regular Tuesday night. And these lectures came in series of six or 10, 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 now here comes my 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 gives shape to chaos. 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 10 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 Murcia Eliade on a single impossible to read slide projected behind him. And then during the Q and 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, 100% 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 mystiques 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 2022-2024. 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 Christian Keith Ranieri, 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 hangups, 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 Granick Allen, who was running on one issue. 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 and 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, Alan 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 tradcaths 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 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. And at the conservative think tank, the Manning Center.