The woke madness must end
Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks to a full house at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa, Ont. on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. Photo by Bryan Passifiume /National Post
It may amuse all of you who have become somewhat cynical in recent years to hear what has most lately become of my battle with the tyrants of compassion and masters of incompetence at the Ontario College of Psychologists and (more recently) Behaviour Analysts — a recent unnecessary change and extension of name that appears all-too-convenient to my cynical eye, hiding them as it does from easy online search and the no-doubt horrible pressure of international public opinion regarding their actions in my regard. Remember if you will, or be now informed that I have been scheduled for an indefinite course of professional education by appointees of that institution for expressing my opinions in a country that apparently no longer considers that acceptable for its professionals (depending, of course, on the opinions). I appealed that decision, to the highest court in the land — a legal entreaty that was rejected as of Aug. 27.
A few days after that I sent in a request to the powers that be at the college, requesting, in all due humility, the names of the wizards or witches who stood at the ready to re-educate me: to convince me of my sins, spoken and acted; to rehabilitate me, so that I could now proudly serve as yet another voiceless, craven coward, duly supporting the butchers of the trans child-mutilation and sterilization crowd, the brain-dead admirers (or silent enemies) of the Trudeau administration and its assorted green-idiot utopian globalists, and the self-righteous race-baiting pushers of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity mantra. I did so because the judgment of the college indicated that after my defeat at the hands of the woke and captured Canadian judiciary I was required to transform my personality comprehensively within a maximum three-month period, and to indicate my abject contrition while doing so.
All this, as the deserving party — at least according to the judgment of college and court mandarins alike — I was willing to do. I complied. I agreed. I accepted my punishment. I awaited my correction, like a good trick pony. All legal avenues had been (expensively) exhausted. And so, boys and girls of the COPABA: On with the show!
I had been previously provided with a document that listed the “social media experts” at the ready to perform their magical incantations on my recalcitrant psyche — despite the fact that there is no such profession as “social media expert,” and that no one who was such a rare beast would stoop to inform me of my misbehaviour, being no doubt much more properly occupied educating the veritable millions of followers they had gathered as the only possible valid expression of their much vaunted expertise.
One problem remained, and a serious one, indeed, practically speaking: the very lines in the document that contained the identifying information of the experts (names, email addresses, professional standing, and telephone numbers) had been redacted, no doubt to protect their fragile and hoping-to-be anonymous selves against the reactions of the legions of reactionary trolls I would unleash in my indefensible efforts to defend myself.
A response was soon forthcoming, in written form: due to some (conveniently undescribed) administrative confusion, the names were presently unavailable. The good people at the college were, however — in their great benevolence and wisdom — willing to extend my three-month purgatorial period, perhaps indefinitely (?), while the necessary information was rounded up and provided. A few weeks hence their lawyers contacted my lawyers and informed the latter and me that a settlement offer might be possible. This, by way of foreshadowing, was not the eminently unreasonable (apparently) offering I had made publicly, in this very newspaper, suggesting that the college modify its policies so that the professionals it purports to regulate could not be tormented and impoverished by the mendacious and noisome complaints of any old ideological idiot anywhere but only by people to whom actual service, however wretched, had actually been provided — and only by if not actual inhabitants of the province in question (in this case, Ontario) at least Canada. No, it was none of that — and this speaks directly to the stunning incompetence and generalized cluelessness of the parties in question, and also to the absolute impoverishment of their worldview.
Note also that since it is now early October, the college only has about seven weeks to straighten out the mess they created around themselves, without violating their own rules, and to repair me one way or another, in the hopefully permanent manner they are devoutly hoping to manage. Or, what is more likely — the rules of engagement apply to me, but not to them. Thus, I have three months to become re-educated, but they have infinite time to organize the process. And there would be little more convenient in this stickiest of situations than kicking the proverbial damned can a little farther down the road.
Their first offer was (get this — and I still can’t believe it): “If Dr. Peterson agrees to resign, we would be willing to forego the legal costs the court ruled he owes us!” That was some two dozen thousands of dollars, a not inconsiderable sum (although a mere pittance in comparison to what their decade-long campaign of harassment and petty torment has cost me — some 25 times that amount in direct legal fees alone, an amount sufficient to bankrupt the typical target of their inquiry, particularly in combination with the devastation of professional income that all-too-often accompanies such inquisition. Thus, their opening gambit was based on the assumptions (1) that I could be bought and (2) that I could be bought cheaply.
The first was truly insulting, as well as preposterous: if cost alone was going to stop me, it would have happened long ago. The second was ironically laughable, and an indication of their ignorance regarding what is at stake here: if I was for sale — and I am not — it would be for a hell of a lot more than the court costs that the Supreme Court deemed me liable for when my appeal was rejected. I am already in over my head for a lot more than that on the expenditure side alone; in addition, I have enough stable sources of income now arrayed around me such that the amount in question is not a relevant determinant of my behaviour, as the college tyrannocrats should have realized, had they done an iota of necessary homework.
I should indicate just for the continuance of the high comedy that I discovered while paying my dues last year that this same college had found it necessary to raise the annual cost for being a professional subject of their tender machinations by almost 50 per cent — a substantial proportion of which was no doubt to pay the costs they had incurred pursuing me. It was very annoying of course to pay them for coming after me, on the personal side. More generally, however, almost nothing stupider could be imagined than the college tempting bankruptcy by pointlessly tormenting me, at the cost of the other members, but here we are in Canada in 2024, with no shortage of stupidity to come.
I will also point out the sheer foolishness of starting what is meant hypothetically to be a productive discussion with such an approach, although, as I intimated, it gets worse. Here’s a hint, boys and girls of the College of Psychologists and Behaviour Therapists or Analysts (or whatever the hell you call yourself now): don’t begin a negotiation, particularly when you are already backed into a corner, by insulting your would-be partner in play. In this particular case, more specifically: don’t assume that the target of your offer is open to something approximating a bribe, because that is what it was, particularly when all evidence suggests the contrary. In addition: if you are indeed daring and foolish enough to make such an offer, don’t compound your error by cheapening out.
After we dispensed with that offer, something that happened forthwith, with our jaws wide open in amazement, the truth came so painfully out — and this is the main point of this missive: despite pursuing me for nearly 10 years; despite their endless public proclamations about their readiness to dispense justice upon me; despite their insistence of the mavens of the college that I was in desperate need of pretty much a comprehensive psychic restructuring and public shaming — despite my agreement, private and public, to go ahead with exactly that, in pillories and stock, accepting the tar and chicken feathers — there was not a single available “social media expert” available at hand to take on the task!
This could be a consequence of a direct warning I had made in a very public discussion about this matter with my daughter Mikhaila Fuller, posted on my YouTube channel, where I said (with all due and genuine concern for my hypothetical teacher) something approximating: “Don’t take the job! I will make EVERY BIT OF IT public, and in the most broadly distributed sort of way! Millions of people are hungry to watch me be re-educated, friend and foe alike, popcorn in hand, eating up both the scandal and the snack. In consequence, the life of whomsoever is narcissistic, clueless or ideologically-addled enough to take on the task will never be the same!” I meant this whole-heartedly, seriously, and it was (all objections to the contrary) not a threat, but a true warning. The typical person has no idea what it is like to have their identity known to all, on an international scale — I’m speaking here of the hypothetical re-educator — and I regarded it as necessary to offer fair warning to anyone considering the job. It will not be an experience from which recovery will be at all possible.
I don’t know, of course, if it was that specific warning that did the trick. There were plenty of other reasons for someone to be wary. The situation surrounding me in regards to the college is a very deep pit indeed, with a great variety of snakes within it biting every which way, and only a fool or a narcissist of preposterous presumption would plunge into that, regardless of financial recompense or the glories of sticking it to the only conservative psychologist apparently in existence in Canada — or at least the only one foolish enough to make his views known.
There are other blackly comedic elements to this story. I’ll list a few, just for amusement — more seriously, just to indicate the utter shallowness of the case(s) the college is pursuing. First, a reminder: I am on the hook, “ethically speaking,” because I dared to expose the utter lying mendacity of the green climate apocalypse mongers, who have stacked a preposterous economic analysis far too precariously upon some seriously faulty analysis of the vagaries of weather. Even the IPCC admits there is no “climate crisis,” and serious analysts, such as the great Bjorn Lomborg, indicate that the likely worst-case scenario a hundred years hence is that we will be a few degrees warmer than we are now, and slightly poorer, relatively speaking, to what we might have been, in the absence of such change, although still more than 400 per cent richer in absolute terms than we are now.
I said as much on Joe Rogan’s podcast, far and away the most influential media show in the world — the entire transcript of which was then submitted to the delusional green nasties of the college as evidence of my unsuitability to help my clients overcome their obsessive compulsive disorder. How else did I sin, and so egregiously so? I objected vociferously to the brutal, greedy, arrogant sadists of the “gender-affirming” movement, and to the mutilating and sterilizing experimental surgery they so happily conduct on lost and miserable pubescent adolescents. These are, by the way, the very same individuals I predicted to the Canadian Senate in 2016 that would be confused, and dangerously so, by the pathological provisions of the oh-so-compassionate and virtuous Bill C-16, which should have been entitled “Legislation to Convince Vulnerable and Alienated Girls to have their Breasts Sliced Off.” I didn’t imagine then that it could go so far, but — as I said — here we are, and the good guys are apparently on the side of the knife-wielders and their castrating allies and chums.
I also criticized Justin Trudeau, our narcissist-in-chief, and his enabling, complicit henchmen — and in a rather prescient manner, if I do say so myself. Doing so in today’s Canada, even under the nominal rule of the Conservatives, apparently makes me unsuitable for my profession, according to trouble-making basement-dwelling idiot ideologues distributed somewhat randomly around the world, although assiduously attended to by the Canadian college bureaucrats and good thinkers. I also said some rather pointed things both about an obese model who was pretending to be both healthy and beautiful, in the athletic manner that defines and will forever define both swimsuit models and actual sportswomen, and about the manipulators of public opinion and facilitators of her unfortunate and dangerous delusion at Sports Illustrated magazine. Why dangerous? For the same reasons I went after the actress Ellen (now actor Elliot) Page: celebrities in a position to influence young men and women who look to them as role models should not publicize views that would entice them either to do terrible things to their bodies (as in the case of Page and her mutilating surgery) or accept the “body positivity” doctrines that make of the obesity that is clearly unhealthy something to admire and celebrate.
It is precisely for holding such opinions, which are not so much opinions in my estimation as mere statements of the absolutely self-evident, that I am held now by my peer/superiors to be worthy of re-education, if they could only find someone to perform such a delicate, unpleasant and, let’s be honest, absolutely impossible and Sisyphean task. My entire personality would have to be removed and replaced by the weak-kneed ghost of butter-won’t-melt-in-his-mouth Justin Trudeau, or Steven Guilbeault, or Kamala Harris or, horror of all horrors, Jagmeet Singh for such re-education to take hold. That is a comprehensive bit of surgery that would likely kill both host and physician (or at least make both of them wish that they were dead).
I might also inform you of the sorts of questions I put to the college, while the earlier stages of this expensive, time-consuming and damaging charade unfolded. Remember: the right to free speech of one Canadian in five is at stake here (the proportion of regulated professionals in our once fair country), as well as the requirement of Canadians to be served by experts in their domain who are honest and say forthrightly what they believe to be true. I asked them, “by what standards do you accredit your ‘social media experts’? Is that a regulated profession? Are these experts also versed in the complexities of clinical psychology? How else can they improve the professional activities of a psychological practitioner? Is there any concrete, published and peer-reviewed evidence that the tender lessons they purport to provide actually produce an improvement in the behaviour of those they “educate?” By what objective criteria are you going to measure my improvement, in that regard? Are there standardized tests of such progression? How were those standards established, if they exist? — and of course they don’t.” On another, related, tack: “How many complaints have you received about the behaviour of your own members, in relation to your actions concerning me? Compared to how many you have received about the specifics of my behaviour? What have you done about those complaints, given that you are bound by duty to investigate every complaint? If inquiries into your own conduct were rejected, what were the grounds?” etc. etc.
All of those questions are and were, as I well knew, impossible for the college to answer.
First: just as there is no such thing as Santa Claus, and no such thing, as well, say, as a unicorn, there is no such thing as a “social media expert,” as intimated earlier. Even if there were, and there isn’t, there is no such thing as a social media expert who is also well trained as a psychologist — with the possible singular exception of me, at least in Canada, and I am the one on trial! There are also simply no recognized and genuine standards by which such re-education can be judged, not least because the true game is and always has been for me to fail, expensively, such that my licence can be revoked, and my evil hypothetically right-wing voice disgraced, castigated and silenced. There were certainly far more complaints submitted to the college about its own behaviour than complaints submitted about me — if not, college members, make the numbers public, as I also requested — but none of the former class were pursued, compared to about a dozen of the latter. In consequence of all these extremely inconvenient truths, touched upon by my inquiries, not a single one of my questions was answered, despite being submitted in writing, and as part of the ongoing “trial.”
So, that’s where we stand, Canadians. In closing, I am going to outline what I think my esteemed colleagues and self-proclaimed moral superiors at the college are now bound to do, out of options as they now so stupidly find themselves. Unable to find a “social media expert” willing to engage in my re-education, they will appoint one of their own or a minion thereof to take on the task. In doing so, they will attempt to arrange with me “nothing but a heartfelt conversation,” of relatively short duration, which I will still make entirely public, but which will contain nothing but cliched niceties on their part. They will then claim, in their own defence, that all the college wanted all along was nothing but just such a “dialogue” — that all this was just a big misunderstanding, which the evil and touchy Dr. Peterson, such a publicity hound, and paranoid to boot, blew entirely out of proportion.
Mark my words. How do I know they will do this? Because (1) that is the stupidest outcome I can possibly imagine, and, therefore, the most likely, in the increasingly clown-world that Canada has become and (2) because that is what I would do, if I was at my most conniving and malevolent, in their now so uncomfortable position.
The alternative is that the college actually find some poor deluded soul who has lived under a rock for the past 10 years and is blind and deaf enough to take the job, in which case they will do everything they can to make it difficult for me to publicize the process. I swear, however, that there is no way any of this is going to proceed in secret. Secretiveness is the very hallmark of the would-be totalitarian, and I am not going to go along with it. I am one hundred per cent willing to make my part in the re-education process public, warts and all: to say and record everything I believe to be true, spontaneously, without practiced preparation and in the absence of editing, and to release it for general consumption. If the college does anything whatsoever to interfere with my vow to make this public, that is something else vital that must be attended to by the Canadian public: the very people charged with your hypothetical protection are in that case the same actors unwilling to let you know what they, or their agents, are truly up to.
Draw the appropriate lessons, Canucks: Honest people let the light of day shine on their actions. Dishonest people hide in the crevices, fulminating all the while about some necessary secrecy being in the public interest of all concerned.
Mark these words, too, in closing: every single miserable blackly comic bit of this idiot charade will be made available, one way or the other, for the delectation of all interested observers, here and abroad. I suspect, in closing, that the college will in consequence insist that I be re-educated in person, despite them now conducting their own business primarily from the comfort of home. This will be difficult for me, and designed to be so, with my touring schedule and my increasingly frequent habitation in the U.S., as well as making the recording I have promised to undertake more unlikely. This, however, will not stop me. That’s a promise. If I request online meetings with my educator, instead of direct person-to-person instruction, and that request is rejected, that will be for no other reason than production of the aforementioned difficulties. Consider, for a moment, in this regard, the evident proclivity of the members of the college itself to conduct their business from home, particularly in the aftermath of their discomfort with attending their office, after the recent spates of bad publicity. Consider as well the fact that most Canadian government employees do much of their work online and not in person.
I’ve also got something to say to Doug Ford, here, current leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, premier of the province of my residence and, hypothetically and to some degree in practice, an ally of mine, at least ideationally. I have spoken at his house. We have had dinner together, and I find him far preferable to the idiot alternatives of the devastated and certainly deserving of it Ontario Liberal party and whatever the NDP has turned into as of late. However, he appears to have a blind spot when it comes to the truly idiot left. The school boards in this province, particularly in Toronto, have gone completely out of their mind, pushing the worst elements of the rainbow mafia agenda, and fulminating on the gender fluidity front in the most despicable of manners. Ford is an agreeable individual, who wants to be liked, and there is something to be said about a politician who truly wants to be appreciated by his constituents. At least he will work to please them, and that can be a good thing. I also personally observed an admirable degree of humility in the province’s leader. Ford does not have to be the smartest person in the room — something that someone who is not so smart (and I am not speaking of him here) can only manage by surrounding himself with idiots. He has the confidence and the wisdom, perhaps in consequence of managing a family business for so long, to bring aboard and listen to truly competent experts, both within his cabinet and administration and without.
However, agreeable people, even when surrounded voluntarily by those who are competent, can have their blind spots. This is particularly true when it comes to the more pernicious forms of malevolence that the more psychopathic, hiding behind the ideology of compassion, are capable of manifesting. I have noticed the same thing with the Democrats and their leaders in the U.S., many of whom I have met, at least privately (as they tend not to agree to speak with me, when anyone might notice). They have no imagination for evil, and there is a certain amount of that afoot right now — some of which is making itself manifest in the form of the tilt toward authoritarian ideology characteristic of the mid-level bureaucrats in so many degenerating Canadian institutions. This is dangerously true of the education system, both K-12 and university — but also of the governing bodies of the professions, most notably, teaching, psychology, medicine and law.
I have been directly subjected to the tender mercies of the midwits purporting to regulate psychology, but I know many physicians, lawyers and teachers who have been under attack, personal, professional and ideational, by the hypocrites of the woke left. Like many corporate CEOs, oblivious of the danger of the DEI mob and the globalist ESG true believers, he thinks the claims of the progressive left to inclusion and equity and diversity are at worst misdirected and at best genuine in their attempts to make the world a nicer and more welcoming place. Some of this is true. The Democrats I have spoken with, for example, blind to the worst of the resentful leftist radicals, believe that their more extreme counterparts are just trying to push, for example, equality of opportunity. When I ask them why they use a different word — equity; that is, equality of outcome, not opportunity — they invariable handwave, protesting, “I have never met someone who really believes that.” In this day and age, as the cliché goes, such naiveté is inexcusable. The universities are chock full of resentful people, annoyed that the evil capitalists make more money than they do, who really believe that, or are at least willing to act in all manners as if they do. I don’t want special treatment from Ford, or his government. But I do want him to wake up to the danger that he is avoiding, while cozying up a bit too tightly to our narcissist-in-chief PM Justin Trudeau and his juvenile ideologically-possessed minions, or to Olivia Chow, who would make Toronto into Portland, Seattle or Vancouver in a heartbeat if she had her way.
Mr. Ford: are you critical of Justin, and his ideas, or of Jagmeet Singh? Do you believe that sex is assigned at birth, and infinitely malleable, except in the case of homosexuality, which is fixed at conception and absolutely unchangeable no matter what? Do you believe that all the girls who are having their breasts removed (that is hundreds in Canada and thousands in the U.S.) have merely discovered their true selves, having been persecuted throughout history and finally found freedom, or that they are the mutilated, unhappy, sterilized and demolished victims of a particular insidious epidemic of psychopathology? Do you believe that fat and unhealthy is beautiful and athletic, and that those who dare to say otherwise should be prosecuted, fired and shamed? Do you believe, finally, that the production of CO2 is such a catastrophe that the entire West should de-industrialize, just to serve as an example to the world, while China builds coal-fired electrical plants like a house afire, and the Communist authoritarians there extend their dominion over the world?
And if you don’t believe these things — or even believe their opposites, as I do — why are you standing all-too-idly by while those who believe the absolute contrary dominate the education system, propagandize our young people (particularly if female, much to their detriment) and extend the tentacles of their authority over the speech and action of every regulated professional in your province? To say nothing of agitating constantly, publicly and shameful on behalf of the totalitarian Islamic extremists. Sir: you are definitely better than the alternatives, but you are still acting like a progressive, in slow motion. That is exactly what the Conservatives did in the U.K., and look at the truly unhappy and dire state of that country now.
All right, fellow citizens, that’s my update. I’ve said what I wanted to say, regarding the college, and provided what I could of my current insight into the likely further machinations and manoeuvrings of the sad and sorry College of Psychologists or Psychologist and Behavioural Analysts or Therapists or whatever the hell they call themselves so inclusively. I fired a shot over the bow of the nominally Conservative government, which is ultimately responsible for this sorry mess, too, even though I do so with some regret and trepidation, believing truly as I do that the Liberals and (shudder) NDP in this province would certainly be indescribably worse.
I will sign off, finally, with this.
I made the college a fair offer, very publicly, in the pages of this very newspaper, very soon after the Supreme Court handed down its Aug. 27 ruling. There was no evidence whatsoever in the consequent approach of the college negotiators to me that they had considered anything I had written, despite its transparent reasonableness and oh-so-public offering, and certainly none that they had integrated into their hypothetical settlement offer. This is yet more evidence, if evidence is needed, of their essential bad faith and intransigent, punitive, self-righteous bureaucratic stubbornness and blindness. They approached me, instead, with the ultimate in foolishness, compounding their errors, continuing to stumble forward in the blind, counterproductive, wasteful and expensive manner that has characterized their every move for more than 10 years. Then they admitted that they did not have the wherewithal or the ability to undertake administering the very re-education process they have so publicly and continually demanded I submit myself to.
God only knows how it will all end. But it certainly appears, as of the current moment, that the much-vaunted and much-moralized-publicly-about re-education efforts of the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts have been brought to a shuddering and shameful halt, not least because of the utter indefensibility of their own position.
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