Jordan peterson

A trap for the right

From our UK edition

On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine will. Butler, famous for his rationalism, reacted with cold indignation. ‘Sir,’ he told Wesley, ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’ The Bishop spoke for England. We do not ‘do’ God – not even the 49 per cent of us who actually believe in God.

Wrestling with Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is one of those curious figures who has, thanks to the mysterious operations of the internet, been thrust into the limelight, willingly or not. While he has become a locus of hatred for certain left-wingers, thanks to his implacable attitude toward “woke” phenomena, in reality his supposedly controversial advice amounts to little more than that young people should work hard and take responsibility for their actions. Even the bolshiest socialist couldn’t really disagree. His 12 Rules for Life is a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has a large and adoring fanbase.

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Orlando Reade: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

From our UK edition

36 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Orlando Reade, whose book What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost describes the life and afterlife of one of the greatest poems in the language. Orlando tells me how Milton’s epic has been read with – and against – the grain over the centuries; how it went from being a totem of English exceptionalism to being an encouragement to postcolonial revolutionaries and political thinkers from Malcolm X to C. L. R. James; how the modernists wrestled with Milton… and how Jordan Peterson gets it wrong.

The report of Christianity’s death has been an exaggeration

From our UK edition

George Orwell began his beautiful, nostalgic pre-war novel Coming up for Air with an epigraph from a popular song. ‘He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.’ It’s tempting to borrow the line when writing about Christianity in the West today. The chronicle of its death has been long foretold, its obituary repeatedly rewritten. Numbers, particularly in older denominations, have been heading south for decades, and churches (in Britain at least) have been shutting ever since over-enthusiastic Victorians opened far too many of them. Yet at the same time immigration is revivifying congregations everywhere. Many people show signs of spiritual openness, few speaking well of the kind of bare-knuckle rationalism that characterised New Atheism.

Russell Brand lauds magical amulet keeping him safe from WiFi

Comedian-turned-“right-wing Christian influencer" Russell Brand has discovered a new stream of income: hawking enchanted objects. Brand appeared in a recent TikTok ad for Aires Tech, claiming “airports are places full of WiFi and all sorts of evil energies,” and so everyone needs a “magical amulet from Aires Tech” to keep you safe from “all sorts of signals out there.” The amulet, or the “Lifetune Flex,” sells for $239.99 on their website. The gold encasing and green center make it look like something that belongs around Doctor Strange’s neck: very majestic, very wizardly. Criticism, understandably, abounds. “They are gutter-slime,” a video essayist tweeted, grouping Russell Brand with Jordan Peterson.

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My problem with the American election

From our UK edition

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And – praise be – a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence. No, my problem with American elections – and it viscerally distresses me every four years – is the affront to democracy called the electoral college. I’ve done the maths. The electoral college can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of ‘swing’ states. A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well.

Rescue the Republic didn’t meet expectations

This Sunday, steps away from the Washington Monument, a ragtag group of disgruntled, self-described classical liberals, seed oils disrespecters, public intellectuals and former Democrats assembled for the Rescue the Republic rally.  The event was spearheaded by Dr. Bret Weinstein, a “canceled ” evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster. In the days leading to the event, he imagined it as a civilizational moment — “This will be ‘an event’ in the same way that Woodstock was ‘a music festival.’ I truly believe that.” Sadly for Weinstein, the event fell short of a revolutionary event, with most of the crowd concentrating next to the stage, leaving lots of space in the back.

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Dads rock

During the Q&A portion of a Jordan Peterson lecture I recently attended, host Konstantin Kisin presented a question from the audience: “My son was just born. How do I know how to be a father if I didn’t have a father? What makes a great father?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. As someone who spends entirely too much time online viewing the virtual culture wars play out on X/Twitter, I’ve noticed no one has more to say about relationships and raising children than the unmarried, childless peanut gallery that occupies the “manosphere.” Like every online genre, the loose collection of blogs, podcasts, forums and websites that constitute the manosphere exist on a spectrum.

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How Canada discovered resistance

In February 2022, I attended the Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and struck up a conversation with a hunting guide from Newfoundland. We talked about guided trips to hunt moose and caribou and about how much of a haul it is to get from Newfoundland to Pennsylvania (and to pretty much anywhere else, for that matter). At the time the “Freedom Convoy” — in which Canadian truck drivers were joined by thousands of demonstrators protesting Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates — was in full swing. My newfound Newfoundland friend seemed to be as polite and self-effacing as the stereotype, so I felt comfortable asking his thoughts on the Freedom Convoy.

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Fans of a hit teen drama are trying to cancel its star actor

Fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty, a hit teen drama on Amazon Prime adapted from a young adult book series of the same name, are furious after discovering that one of the show's lead actors “liked” some conservative social media posts. Cockburn was first alerted to the controversy by his niece, who describes herself as the show's "biggest fan" and regularly trawls Reddit threads about the Amazon streaming series. The Summer I Turned Pretty is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl, Isabella or "Belly,” who finds herself caught in a love triangle with a pair of brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. Just like with the love triangles in the Twilight and Hunger Games series, fans endlessly debate over who Belly should end up with.

gavin casalegno

Why I chose virtue over vice

From our UK edition

Patmos A funny thing happened on my way to this beautiful place, an island without druggies, nightclub creeps, clip joints or hookers. I stopped in Athens for about five hours in order to look over old haunts and just walk around places I’d known as a youth, when I noticed something incredible: none of the youngsters I encountered were texting, nor were they glued to their mobiles and bumping into people. Sure, some were on their phones, but the majority of them were talking and gesticulating like normal humans used to do before the technology curse rained down on us. Well, as they say, nothing lasts for ever, and once I was on Patmos friends informed me that what I had noticed in Athens was Alice in Wonderland stuff.

Why I won’t grow up

Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy? Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea. Reader, I’m not that man — yet. No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up.

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What should we make of the esoteric philosophy Traditionalism?

From our UK edition

Last August a bomb tore through a Toyota Land Cruiser outside Moscow killing its 29-year-old driver. Darya Dugina, a pro-war TV pundit, had been returning from a conservative literary festival where her father, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, had been giving a talk on tradition and history. Quite possibly he was the intended target. Alexander Dugin was called ‘Putin’s Brain’ by Foreign Affairs magazine and ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ by Breitbart. He had advocated conflict with the West and told Russians they should ‘kill, kill, kill’ Ukrainians. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attack.

What Jordan Peterson gets wrong about anonymous Twitter accounts

“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.” So sayeth not Grendel69 on Twitter, but Alexander Hamilton, writing under the name Publius, the handle he adopted along with James Madison and John Jay when they were writing The Federalist Papers. But if Twitter had existed, well, Hamilton may well have been a shitposter, one who made Grendel69 look like a lightweight. Anonymity, pseudonymity, whatever you want to call it, is oft maligned, particularly in the digital square. The debate about it will likely always be with us, unless, somehow, the internet magically ceases to exist, forcing mankind up out of its sitting position. (As that wouldn’t be good for my income streams, I’m going to have to hope it keeps on keeping on.

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How to throw a book party

London The launch party for my book has gotten sensational reviews. “Party of the year!” said one friend. “Simply brilliant!” said another. A hack from the Times declared, “It was like an old-fashioned Fleet Street Party” — by which he meant everyone was drunk, dancing and misbehaving. Unfortunately, my book has not gotten sensational reviews. It’s gotten no reviews — at least from the national press. This is a cause for worry. Or so my publisher Todd Swift of Eyewear Publishing thinks. The day after the party he calls me. I’m still buzzing with my party reviews; he’s buzzing with panic. Todd tells me that no reviews mean we can’t get my book into the major bookshops! I’d hate to see your great book die, he says.

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I was upstaged by Jordan Peterson

I’ve been inviting friends to my book launch and have gotten all sorts of reasons why they (“sadly”) won’t be able to attend: away on holiday, work commitments, family obligations, etc. But the most interesting reason for not coming to my book launch is one a very old friend gave me: “That’s the night I’m having dinner with Jordan Peterson.” “What?” I asked incredulously, “Are you going to dump me and my big night for dinner with Jordan Peterson?” There was a long pause before my friend said, “Ahh... let me get back to you on that.” This conflict of interests — me versus Peterson — poses an interesting moral and philosophical question for my friend and for all of us: what are the duties and obligations of friendship?

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Are you man enough to eat raw offal?

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called “CarnivoreMD” (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: “If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male... or alpha female.” Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer consigned to memories of the postwar school cafeteria, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word “offal” implies wastage — from the Middle Dutch for offcuts — but it can also be a delicacy. Foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called “variety meat.” But a new wave of offal-lovers is reviving an interest in organs.

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Twitter gives Jordan Peterson the boot, Dave Rubin follows

Jordan Peterson went from being a psychologist advising troubled kids to an unlikely political figure as he fought against the Canadian government’s compelled speech law for pronouns. Cockburn watched with fascination as Peterson clashed repeatedly with the left-wing narrative, even going as far as to resign from his tenured position at the University of Toronto due to their rampant leftist ideology. On June 28, Twitter suspended him for this tweet (as recalled by his daughter): https://twitter.com/MikhailaFuller/status/1541946666567323649 Clearly referring to someone by their birth name is a sin for Twitter. Little did Cockburn know that Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report, was to be next on the chopping block. Rubin sent this tweet before being suspended: https://twitter.

‘Harder than heroin’: America’s silent benzo epidemic

“Imagine taking a pill that makes you instantly feel relaxed, and then imagine that when you stop taking it, you feel worse than when you first started.” That's how one user describes benzodiazepines, a psychoactive drug prescribed to treat insomnia, anxiety and seizures. But while “benzos” can have some short-term benefits, habitual use can cause long-term damage. Another user writes that his benzodiazepine addiction was “harder to overcome than heroin.” A young professional I interviewed said she'd never had addiction issues before trying benzodiazepines, which were prescribed by her doctor.

Jordan Peterson and the crisis of totalitarian academia

Jordan Peterson has left his professorial post at the University of Toronto. He announced his departure with characteristic blunt honesty in Canada’s National Post. Peterson first came to my attention in 2016, as he did for many, for his refusal to bow to demands to use novel pronouns preferred by the transgendered. For this, he was denounced as a bigot, his university threatened his career, his speaking events were disrupted, all done under the cloak of civility: all transgender people wanted was respect, to be addressed as who they were. How dare Peterson be so uncivil? Lost in the shrieking winds that enveloped him was his basic point: it’s no longer civility when it's backed up by the force of law.

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