There exists a peculiar phenomenon in the intellectual landscape of our time — a man who hides behind the armor of credentials while spouting nonsense with the conviction of Moses descending from the mountain. Jordan Peterson, that professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto, has mastered the art of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, dazzling the credulous with bombastic verbiage while the discerning observer witnesses nothing but a carnival barker hawking pseudointellectual snake oil.
Let us not mince words here. The man is, to put it in terms that would likely send him scrambling for his thesaurus, full of shit.
This self-appointed messiah to disaffected young men began his meteoric rise by lying — yes, lying — about Bill C-16, a modest piece of Canadian legislation that simply added gender identity to existing anti-discrimination laws. Peterson, with the dramatism of a third-rate Shakespearean actor, declared he would rather starve himself in prison than comply with imaginary pronoun police that existed only in the fever dreams of his increasingly baroque paranoia. Legal experts universally condemned his interpretation as nonsense, yet his followers, desperate for a champion against the phantom menace of “postmodern neo-Marxism,” lapped it up like kittens at a saucer of milk.
The Carnivore Carnival: Peterson’s Dietary Delusions
Perhaps nowhere is Peterson’s intellectual charlatanism more nakedly exposed than in his evangelical promotion of the so-called “carnivore diet” — an absurd nutritional regimen that would make even the most committed Paleolithic revivalist blush with embarrassment. “I eat beef and salt and water. That’s it. And I never cheat. Ever,” he proclaimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, with all the zealotry of a man experiencing a religious conversion rather than a nutritional change.
According to the Gospel of Peterson, this miraculous meat-only diet cured his depression, anxiety, gastric reflux, snoring, gum disease, and psoriasis. One half-expects him to claim it also restored his virginity and taught his pet lobster to recite Solzhenitsyn.
Any qualified nutritionist — those inconvenient experts with actual knowledge — would tell you this dietary approach lacks scientific support, defies basic nutritional science, and potentially endangers those foolish enough to follow it. But why let evidence intrude upon a good story? Peterson, ever the clinical psychologist, naturally feels qualified to dispense nutritional advice with the certainty of someone who has never encountered the concept of epistemic humility.
The man speaks with the conviction of Moses on Sinai while peddling advice that wouldn’t pass muster in a high school health class.
The Fascist Whisperer: Dog Whistles and Authoritarian Tendencies
Peterson’s flirtation with far-right talking points reveals the hollowness at the core of his supposed classical liberalism. His incessant railing against “postmodernism” and “cultural Marxism” — the latter term having deeply problematic roots in literal Nazi propaganda — provides just enough plausible deniability while sending clear signals to the darkest corners of the internet. His work has been enthusiastically embraced by the alt-right not because they’ve misunderstood him, but because they hear exactly what he’s saying.
The man who claims to stand for individual rights has called for the creation of a website identifying “postmodern neo-Marxist” professors and courses so students can avoid them — a blacklist by any other name would smell as foul. Such calls for punitive measures against ideological opponents reveal the authoritarian instincts lurking beneath the veneer of intellectual freedom.
Peterson’s fans might object to characterizing him as having fascist sympathies, but as the saying goes, if nine people sit down with one fascist for dinner without objection, you have ten fascists at the table. Peterson may not be goose-stepping through Toronto, but he’s certainly been willing to break bread with those who flirt with such ideologies.
Climate Confusion and Scientific Illiteracy
“There is no such thing as climate,” Peterson declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, a statement so breathtakingly ignorant it would make a freshman science student cringe in vicarious embarrassment. His climate denialism extends to false claims about fracking never having polluted water supplies — a statement contradicted by mountains of scientific evidence.
This is a man who claims ancient peoples could “literally see their DNA through the use of hallucinogens.” One wonders if Peterson has been partaking of such substances himself, or if he simply makes up nonsense when the spirit moves him.
The Misogynist’s Lament
Peterson’s regressive views on gender are wrapped in the pseudo-scientific veneer that characterizes all his worst intellectual offenses. His suggestion that “enforced monogamy” would cure incel violence is not merely wrong but dangerously so — proposing that women’s bodies and choices should be constrained to pacify violent men. It’s the kind of reasoning that belongs in a dusty 19th-century tome, not the 21st century.
His claim that women would be happier if they would just surrender to motherhood is contradicted by actual research on female happiness, but why let data interfere with telling women their proper place? Peterson possesses the remarkable ability to speak with complete confidence about what would make half the human population happy, despite being neither a woman nor a researcher who has published peer-reviewed work on female happiness.
The Intellectual Fraudster’s Playbook
What emerges when examining Peterson’s career is not merely a pattern of errors but a systematic method of intellectual fraud:
First, obtain legitimate credentials in one field.
Second, leverage those credentials to speak with unearned authority on everything from climate science to ancient mythology, law to diet.
Third, when challenged by actual experts, retreat behind a fog of verbosity and victimhood.
Fourth, selectively quote critical reviews to create the impression of approval, as documented in the misleading quotes on his book covers that present a more favorable impression than the original critics intended.
Fifth, when all else fails, claim to have been misunderstood while changing absolutely nothing about your rhetoric.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario apparently reached their limit with Peterson’s antics, requiring him to undergo social media training due to concerns about the impact of his inflammatory public commentary on the profession’s reputation. One imagines the training was about as effective as teaching table manners to a honey badger.
Peterson’s masterful ability to present himself as both victim and victor, persecuted truth-teller and triumphant sage, would be almost admirable as performance art if it weren’t doing actual harm. His misrepresentations of transgender issues have fueled hostility toward an already marginalized community. His climate denialism contributes to public confusion on existential threats. His dietary evangelism could lead vulnerable people to abandon effective treatments for serious conditions.
Behind the Jungian references and Nietzschean pretensions stands a man who has found that being provocative is more profitable than being precise, that confidence trumps competence in the marketplace of ideas.
Peterson has discovered what every second-rate intellectual with a book to sell eventually learns: in the culture wars, there’s a lucrative niche for anyone willing to tell a certain demographic that their prejudices are actually profound insights, that their resentments are righteous, and that the experts who disagree are corrupt conspirators in some vast ideological plot.
The tragedy is not merely that Peterson is wrong so often and about so much — it’s that he has squandered whatever genuine insights he might have had as a clinician on the altar of celebrity and controversy. The man who tells others to “clean your room” has made a career of intellectual slovenliness.
If Jordan Peterson represented merely another voice in the cacophony of public intellectuals, his failures might be of little consequence. But his influence — particularly over young men seeking guidance in confusing times — makes his intellectual dishonesty a matter of public concern. His followers deserve better than a father figure who cannot or will not distinguish between fact and fiction, between expertise and opinion, between careful thought and careless provocation.
In an age where truth struggles for oxygen in the atmosphere of “alternative facts,” Peterson has not been part of the solution. He has been part of the problem — a contributor to epistemological chaos rather than clarity, hiding behind academic credentials while abandoning academic rigor.
The most damning indictment of Peterson is not that he is wrong — we are all wrong sometimes — but that he seems constitutionally incapable of admitting when he is wrong. That is not the mark of a serious thinker but of a man more committed to his brand than to truth.
There is a word for such a person. That word is not “intellectual.” It is “charlatan.”