A Field Guide to Jordan Peterson’s Political Arguments

If someone is on TV talking about how suppressed their free speech is…their free speech isn’t being suppressed

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Jordan Peterson, a politically outspoken University of Toronto psychology professor, popped up on my news feed after he was invited to address a Monsanto audience about “The Danger of Allowing Ideologies to Grow Unopposed.” Sounded menacing! The invite garnered some thoughtful commentary from the scientific community as well as some illustrative pushback from Peterson’s supporters. And now Peterson is making the interview rounds promoting a new self-help book for young men, which has improbably become a best-seller. So I figured it’d be worth running through his political arguments, especially since I find them a bit lacking.

To be clear, I’ve worked with a lot of academics and public agency researchers who have been attacked by political ideologues, including facing subpoenas, Congressional investigations, and false accusations of fraud from axe-grinding political hacks. So I’m sensitive to the concerns Peterson has brought up about being silenced or intimidated by his political opponents, but I don’t think he has the goods and his claims about the political debates he participates in are muddled, at best. He also fails to directly engage his critics’ arguments and feeds into hand-waving, anti-leftist sophistry by accusing his political opponents of being “cultural Marxists.”

Peterson came to fame opposing a Canadian human rights law based on the mistaken belief that the law would force professors to address trans students by their preferred pronouns. He and his supporters lost that debate and their fears about the law have not come to pass. Never the less, Peterson and his supporters are insistent that PC culture, identity politics, postmodernism and “cultural Marxism” have run amok and that the libs are gunning for them. So here’s a quick field guide to the confused arguments you’ll hear from supposed worshippers of facts and logic.