Jordan Peterson Is a Bigot
He’s also a Canadian psychologist, self-help author, and right-wing personality.
Early this year, Jordan Peterson, the controversial, bigoted former professor at the University of Toronto, retired from his tenured position and did so like a geriatric baby to an audience of millions of people through an op-ed in Canada’s second-most right-wing news publication, The National Post.
He justified his retirement by saying that so many Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (BIPOC) getting hired for research jobs at UoT is bad.
I am exaggerating (only slightly) for effect, and I will be using the word “bigot” a lot to refer to Jordan Peterson because he is one and it’s the most necessary commentary about him. That point deserves to be hammered in: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a bigot. Bigots should be called what they are.
Jordan Peterson is a bigot.
The Main Topic: Peterson’s Bigoted Letter
Jordan Peterson wrote a letter in a Canadian newspaper with national distribution broadly complaining about diversity, equity, and inclusion — together often called DEI. He did so in a very petty way by rearranging the initialism as “D.I.E,” because he’s never been subtle with anything but his belaboured point.
In his multi-paragraph whine fest, Canada’s second most prominent bigot (Peterson) claimed the University of Toronto was hiring unqualified BIPOC people and passing over the straight white students he trained.
He wrote a lot about qualifications, seriously questioning those of all the BIPOC students being hired. He claimed that all the work that could be done in DEI has already been done, that DEI is generally ineffective, that CBS television network DEI mandates are also bad, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks DEI efforts are bad. He capped the article off with a weirdly specific Bible reference, coming across as an odd old man shaking his fist at the left. It was a little all over the place but one constant of Jordan Peterson’s career in the spotlight is that he has these long-winded ways of saying bigotry through innuendo and dog-whistles.
But Jordan Peterson is a bigot.
Peterson; The Man, The Myth, The Bigot
Peterson has a long history of making claims about oppressive hierarchies being the natural and good order of the world while spreading his oppressive rhetoric. What he says is bigotry framed in rhetorical devices meant to make his audience come to his bigoted conclusions without directly saying the bigoted part out loud. His rhetoric is easily weaponized, and his interviews and lectures are intellectually confusing and all over the place.
So it bares repeating: Jordan Peterson is a bigot.
Peterson is someone who continually complains about a “crisis” in masculinity and regularly promotes the idea that boys should be raised to be “strong men” but conversely also routinely ends up crying over minuscule, minor things.
It’s been said that this kind of uncontrollable sensitivity (not the bigotry) can be a side effect of Benzodiazepine addiction, which he used to abuse. I mention this not to criticize his sensitivity (men should regularly express their emotions) but to draw attention to the hypocrisy that he is advocating for a form of masculinity that he cannot uphold within himself.
He is part of his own, self-declared masculinity crisis.
This honestly isn’t surprising to me, because toxic masculinity is often a trait of men who feel they aren’t very masculine. I still want to stress that there’s nothing wrong with being a “soy-boy beta-male guy” who cries in public. That diversity adds a lot of richness and benefits to men, but the fact that Peterson exhibits such sensitivity makes him a hypocrite, on top of being a bigot.
Jordan Peterson, AKA: The Red Skull
In 2018 writer Ta-Nehisi Coates began a three-year run writing for the Marvel Comics “Captain America” series. The titular character faced off against his long-time foe and ideological opposite The Red Skull. I won’t spoil the plot but will say that it involved the villain looking to recruit young men to his ideology.
The Red Skull is an original, uniform-wearing, card-carrying Nazi official kept in suspended animation and awoken in modern times by an evil organization with ties to the original Nazis (Hydra) only to appropriate it to fulfil his ambitions for world domination and to kill his nemesis, Captain America. Comics are weird, even when obvious metaphors for bigotry.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ inspiration for The Red Skull was real-life bigot Jordan Peterson. She used Peterson's quotes as dialogue for the fictional Nazi, and this contextualization does a lot to accurately colour their context and meaning.
Art imitates life. Peterson’s specific bigotry is utilized to make a point about his views.
Peterson, like many in his audience and of his ilk, seems to have no sense of self-awareness because the commentary of a fictional Nazi parroting his ideas is that his views are the same as the beliefs of current Neo-Nazis and their sympathizers, not that Marvel, the media, or culture is being mean to him.
Peterson’s “Style(?)”
Peterson often doesn’t speak coherently but speaks intelligently going off on long tangents while trying to connect an unrelated point or answer to a very pointed and specific question. He will use big words, name-drop often unrelated scientific studies, and frequently meander from the topic in his diatribes while trying to make his usually bigoted point. Sometimes, pinning down exactly what he says can be difficult because of this. He often doesn’t precisely answer the original question asked of him.
Jordan Peterson’s Prejudice And Beliefs
He’s obsessed with oppressive, patriarchal, capitalist hierarchies. He’s an aggressively anti-progressive bigot who doesn’t have an original idea in his head not previously held by a 1940’s era dictator.
He claimed that the gas used in Nazi gas chambers was only a cleaning agent and used as such. He dead-named trans actor Elliot Page in a tweet while claiming his gender transition was bodily mutilation. Not to mention the countless tweets, videos, and articles by Jordan Peterson spreading bigoted misinformation such as that Justin Trudeau is a dictator or Nazis and white supremacists don’t exist in Canada. Which, for the record, is not true. And for the record, Elliot Page is a Haligonian treasure. #TransMenAreMen.
He has touted the idea that white privilege doesn’t exist. Which, other than being provably wrong, is another thing bigots like him do.
Peterson, with bigotry surprising no one by now, has spoken at length about same-sex parents, almost exclusively citing studies that show children from households with two co-parents perform better than children from single-parent families.
He says he believes two-parent homes with a feminine parent and a masculine parent, which uphold the rigid patriarchal hierarchy he favours, are the best environments for children. Other than being sexist, that’s an odd homophobic way to make acceptance of marriage equality and queer people conditional. And though the research that exists does make specific conclusions about two-parent, stable homes for the outcomes of children, the research is by no means conditional on gender or gender roles.
The hierarchy and gender role addition is a strangely bigoted addition of his. That’s one of his common tactics: start with sound information, then add random nonsense deeply rooted in bigotry, or attach conditions to his acceptance like he did the time he was asked about his opinion on same-sex marriage and stated that he would be in favour of it under the condition that one same-sex parent adopts a masculine role and the other adopts a feminine at home. But unfortunately, a conditional bigot is still a bigot.
He frequently complains about “Cultural Marxism,” a far-right, Anti-Semitic, bigoted conspiracy theory that claims Marxism is the basis of academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western (Christian) culture. Cultural Marxism shares similarities with Cultural Bolshevism, an old Nazi propaganda term used to attack the Jews. Cultural Marxism is used to euphemistically attack Jewish people and to shake one’s bigoted fist at the progressive left, which bigots claim is heavily influenced by Jewish people.
Peterson also has expressed another popular bigotry in his refusal to acknowledge trans people’s pronouns or identity — and in fact, that is why he came to prominence. A Canadian law got his ire for “forcing” Canadians to recognize transgender identity and pronouns as valid and compel people to use their preferred pronouns, which he adamantly refused, despite that not being any part of the law nor what it said it did nor possible to accomplish with it. The legislation only added gender and gender identity to existing laws regarding discrimination protections. Peterson’s complaints had nothing to do with the law. Weirdly, he would complain about adding to a law that continues to say Canadians cannot be discriminated against at work, in employment, and in other specific ways. I would say it’s oddly bigoted of him, but it’s not odd at all.
He also spends a lot of time agreeing in principle with known racists, transphobes, and homophobes as well as paling around with the likes of Ezra Levant, who runs Canada’s most bigoted news publication, Rebel News, and Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, and Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report, both right-wing figures in American media known for giving platforms to bigots.
Considering Merit And Qualifications
Jordan Peterson, in the aforementioned bigoted open letter announcing his retirement, stated that Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour hired for the University of Toronto research positions are unqualified. He makes specific mention of their race and lack of qualifications in his National Post op-ed. This is a very common bigoted tactic when discussing BIPOC people — pairing a person’s race, disability, or identity with their perceived ability or qualifications. Peterson used this tactic against BIPOC students, and it was specific and targeted prejudice. Because he is a bigot.
In any discussion of qualifications, the topics required to be discussed are the requirements of the position, the experience and education of the candidate or employee, the performance of the employee in question, and that’s all. Peterson makes a big display of concern for qualifications without mentioning any of these things. The only thing he mentions about these hired employees is their race.
Merit-based systems that are requirements of society, like sports contests and employment, as examples, have to function so that they are blind to categories of people beyond a narrow, universally applicable focus. Because people need employment to live and sports for their health. A lot of work has been done through inclusion efforts to disassociate race from intrinsic qualifications, and now we know that sentiments to the effect of, “group X aren’t qualified for job Y” is, generally, bigotry. The natural assumption — especially among managers, human resources personnel, and those doing the hiring for an organization, is that a discussion of candidates is a discussion of those who meet the basic requirements for the job. Hiring unqualified candidates can have wide-reaching repercussions ranging from lawsuits, safety violations, credibility issues, and reputational damage. And these conversations about hiring in an organization are done, typically, with the understanding that everyone has met the basic qualifications for the position. After that base assumption of qualification, the next consideration made is the applicant’s specific experience and how they, as a person, will affect the organization’s internal culture. And this is assuredly the same at an institution like the University of Toronto. It is for this reason that whenever someone like Peterson says that BIPOC people in a particular job are, blanket statement, unqualified it is overt prejudice that tries to paint every member of that category as inherently unqualified. Even in the kindest interpretation assuming he means the specific BIPOC people in question doing so without actually discussing the specifics of performance, education, experience, and their other qualifications doesn’t lend any credibility to that claim, making it lightly packaged bigotry, which unfortunately is Jordan Peterson’s rhetorical bread and butter. Because he is a bigot.
Doctor Peterson is a bigoted Nazi fanboy😊
The degree to which Jordan Peterson is a bigot is mostly unfathomable because in between his unique multisyllabic nonsense, he also promotes Nazi terms and ideas favoured by 1940’s era bigots, fascists, and dictators. He defends oppressive power structures as natural and good without comprehensive understanding or explanation and frequently talks at length about how he believes there is no inequity but also how any inequity that exists is the natural order of things. You know, like a bigot would.
He continually recycles many different Nazi, alt-right, bigoted, and white supremacist ideas into his weird obsession with hierarchies, which is another idea that Nazis coincidentally love, and defends bigotry being ingrained into these systems as good.
Bigotry And Toxicity: Peterson’s Fans, Apologists, And Philosophy
The worst part of Doctor Peterson’s bigotry comes from two different avenues: his fans and his philosophy.
Sexism and bigotry are central to his weird patriarchal belief system. His philosophy is so ingrained in the patriarchy and the bigotry that comes with it that without the oppression inherent to it the entire belief system breaks down. Without his bigotry, people are simply equal. If people are equal there is no hierarchy. A social hierarchy that is meant to govern and influence organizational hierarchies that Peterson so clearly believes in requires bigotry to create an underclass in the middle and a lower one at the bottom of the system. It is the bigotry itself in Peterson’s worldview that is part of the natural order of this social system. And if it were not for his reach and credentials he would likely only be someone’s bigoted uncle who makes Thanksgiving awkward every October whenever he whines about how feminism is ruining society.
But as a public figure and academic he gives an heir of credibility and gravitas to his bigoted views that sets it apart from Facebook Minion memes. Instead, he provides entire lectures where he cites studies (that don’t make his eventual conclusions), and because he’s saying it in lectures, and on television on Fox News, Piers Morgan, and in interviews with others like Joe Rogan, bigots get to point to him as a source of credibility for their views which often say the overtly bigoted part out loud. Unfortunately, he is so large and so adept at spreading his bigotry that we can’t afford to not talk about him. It’s beyond ignoring this rat in our walls. Because the rat in the walls is a movement that is recruiting like a comic book Nazi in 2018.
His acolytes and apologists are vicious bigots themselves, excusing and justifying, often anecdotally, Peterson’s views. Jordan Peterson’s lobster-themed fanboy bigots enjoy crawling from their shadowy depths to “um-actually” objectors and contrarians with junk science, misquoted studies, overt bigotry and harassment, and lazy justifications in-between insults for calling their man-baby minor deity what he is: a bigot. They are an explicitly toxic social contagion and, frankly, as much of the problem as their Bigot-In-Chief.
In Conclusion:
Doctor Jordan B. Peterson is a bigot.
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