VIDEO: Jordan Peterson plays the hits, as remixed by Vic Berger

Chapo Trap House is problematic at the best of times, but I think they had the best description of Jordan B. Peterson in the phrase “tedious wad.” If he had just come out and say “Yeah, I’m just a boilerplate conservative Christian traditionalist,” it would save us all a lot of goddamned time and effort, but instead he caught on to the time-honoured snake-oil salesman technique favoured by the likes of L. Ron Hubbard that if you wrap up pithy and obvious truisms with jargon and buzzwords, then it makes the reader feel smarter or more enlightened when they are able to reach that truism. Me, I just feel insulted that he felt the need to bury the thesis under layers of bullshit.

And that’s what really gets me about assholes like Peterson (Sam Harris fits this mold too). You know what the University of Toronto Engineering Faculty’s nickname happens to be? “Skule.” Yeah, the joke that engineers are so bad at communicating that they will misspell basic words like “school” is part of the faculty’s identity. Me, I happen to find the nickname endearing, but in third year, we specifically had a course called “Communications in Engineering,” which was meant to cement the fundamentals of writing research papers and getting your ideas across to a particular audience. So clearly the faculty felt it necessary to address what they perceived as a shortcoming of their students.

By contrast, Peterson and Harris, despite all the times they protest that they’re being “taken out of context” when they write or say something that has only one possible policy implication (be it treating trans people like shit or profiling Muslims) claim that their writing is as clear as it can be. To which I have a single very clear and direct response: BULLSHIT. They are dog-whistlers leading their readers to conclusions they personally are too cowardly to admit openly, and abdicate all responsibility for dropping the breadcrumbs that lead to their fans doing terrible things. That’s where the danger lies: bigoted douchebags finding justification for their bigotry. Guys like Peterson and Harris want to seem “dangerous” and “edgy.” They aren’t. They’re just garden-variety assholes I could find in a bigoted in any fundamentalist church congregation, only Harris finds other means to justify his Islamophobia.

I’m glad that Hugo and Jake of The Bible Reloaded have taken him on. I stopped watching them after they hosted Carl of Benjamin as a guest despite GamerGate being a thing at the time, but if they’ve started to come around to how shameless and morally bankrupt these people are, that’s a start.

Textbook stochastic terrorism.

Nail, head, hit.