Jordan Peterson and the Whiff of Mortality

Justin Trudeau has testified under oath that the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet RT is “currently” funding bloggers and other personalities “at the right,” among whom he specifically names Canada’s most famous pop intellectual du jour — or rather du hier — Jordan Peterson. Trudeau’s wording is sufficiently hazy to avoid directly claiming that Peterson himself is knowingly on the take from the Putin regime, although the notion is certainly suggested by his choice to single out Peterson, along with Tucker Carlson, as prominent media figures whose anti-vax positions during the Covid pandemic were actively supported, and therefore possibly influenced, by Putin’s propaganda machine.

I cannot speak to the quality of the evidence Trudeau must be relying on to have made such a statement under oath as though it were not merely a conjecture or a case of connecting the dots, but a declaration of facts to which he is (allegedly) privy. What are those facts, and whence did Trudeau obtain them? He does not say, for whatever reason.

I can, however, offer the following, which is neither conjecture nor any claim of inside knowledge, but merely the evidence of my own eyes and ears, which I have repeatedly stated openly here in Limbo over the past couple of years.

Jordan Peterson rose to fame and glory, suddenly and unpredictably, among millions of people — mostly young men — who were desperate for a quasi-saviour, not on “the right,” as Justin the Chosen One claims, but rather on the alt-right, which is to say the populist-authoritarian, demagogue-infatuated fake right. This twist of fate for the middle-of-the-road academic and moderately popular classroom lecturer proved to be an overwhelming shock to Peterson’s system, sending him reeling into an unceasing and pathetic spiral of self-promotional sell-out, insatiable greed, and delirious megalomania that makes your average Christ complex look like the heights of mental stability by comparison.

With regard to the Covid vaccines, Peterson got vaccinated early, and initially boasted about it, naïvely misreading the sentiments of his “following” (read “leash-holding mob”). Having incurred the confidence-shaking wrath of many of them for, as they saw it, betraying their anti-mandate fight, Peterson quickly did an about face and tried to reframe himself by way of vocal support for the Freedom Convoy truckers protest in Ottawa, precisely as a weak man enslaved to his love of (ersatz) power would be expected to do. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic comes to mind.

(For my own thoughts on Covid, vaccines, and mandates, I refer you to any article stored in the category “Pandemic that Ate a Planet” on this website, and particularly to this one. As for my thoughts on the truckers’ protest at the time, I refer you to my “Of Trudeaus and Truckers.”)

Now, there is nothing in the above that suggests, either directly or indirectly, that Jordan Peterson has received any support from, or is under any other sort of influence by, the Putin regime. However, if (God-willing) soon-to-be-former-Prime-Minister-Trudeau’s testimony is taken as an oblique reference to the more general alignment of Peterson’s populist opinings with those of Tucker Carlson and Carlson’s obvious puppet-masters and script-writers in Moscow, then his words cannot be so easily dismissed. For it is patently obvious, as I have expressed on a few previous occasions, that Peterson has been fully in the tank for Vladimir Putin of late — at least since his humiliating and clearly damaged return from some sort of quack “treatment” for his drug addiction in a Russian hospital — and not merely regarding Ukraine, where his obfuscations and moral equivalency arguments have fallen somewhere between inexcusably stupid and shamefully propagandist, but also, and perhaps even worse, in his general fawning over Vladimir Putin himself as some kind of Christian crusader for traditional “Russian values,” a modern-day Dostoevsky. His special pleading for Putin, his effort to view the clownish KGB poisoner of opponents, schemer against Western stability, kidnapper of children, slaughterer of civilians, and Soviet-empire dreamer, as a “real man” of the sort he has lately re-imagined his own fame-emasculated, pseudo-dandyish self to be, may speak more to that desperate craving for expanded subscriber lists and the love of crowds that Peterson confuses for will to power, than to any secret payoffs from Russian agents. 

On the other hand, one cannot help suspending one’s judgment on the partisan insinuations-cum-testimony of Justin Trudeau, when Peterson responds to his prime minister’s public accusation with stuff like this, on X of course:

Hey Russians! Where the hell is my money?! @justintrudeau strikes again Whiffing at a foul ball.

First off, the fake tough guy talk from this formerly mild-mannered psychology professor (“Where the hell is my money?!”) sounds like a bit of protesting too much, does it not? Add to that his baseball-illiterate absurdity about “Whiffing at a foul ball” — to “whiff,” in baseball lingo, means to swing at and miss the ball, not to mention that no one is swinging at a foul ball, which by definition has already been swung at and hit — and what we see is a lame and incoherent reply to Trudeau’s words, a flimsy and unamusing attempt at a Trumpism we might say, which could easily be interpreted as a shaken and anxious man’s failed attempt to pretend indifference and insouciance. (Or perhaps as the concoction of a Russian troll bot, since the Kremlin propaganda machines posing online as freedom-loving Westerners tend to expose themselves by flubbing their attempts at “good old USA” chatter in precisely this way.)

But for me, the telltale error of Peterson’s X defense, his glaringly obvious whiff, shall we say, is in the opening words: “Hey Russians!”

There it is. “Russians.” As with Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and all other such populist Putin apologists of the moment, Peterson displays a consistent effort to avoid mentioning the real issue, namely the bloody dictator Vladimir Putin, carefully seeking to bury the tyrannical actions of Putin himself by implying that the critics of Kremlin policy, such as Justin Trudeau in this case, are thereby critics of the Russian people, the Russian nation, as though Putin were the man who just happened to be the legitimate representative of those people and that nation at this moment, rather than a murderous usurper who has undermined the Russian people’s dreams of post-Soviet freedom by destroying their new constitution and poisoning or imprisoning all those who dare to oppose his “presidency” in public, so that they, the actual Russians, are living in a state of fear and coercion. This not-so-subtle rhetorical trick, reframing all by-name criticism of Putin himself as mere anti-Russian sentiment, is just the sort of thing that one would expect from propagandists: turning the moral judgment around on the accusers by changing out the tyrant’s name and responsibility for the generalized name of his nation’s population. “Why does the West oppose Russia so vehemently?” is a clever evasion of the real (and self-answering) question, “Why does the West oppose an inhumane and conscienceless dictator with openly-stated global and anti-Western ambitions?”

I cannot say whether Peterson’s motives for pushing his pro-Putin talking points over the past couple of years have more to do with the allure of the ruble or the appeasement of the rabble. But push those talking points he certainly does. And his attempt at a witty rejoinder to Justin Trudeau’s accusation was, to use the baseball expression correctly, a complete whiff — and also has a certain whiff about it, in the more common sense of that word.


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