An excerpt from Milo’s Foreword to Jordanetics.
I’m a smart person. Really smart, actually, and very expensively educated! But half the time, I just can’t understand a bloody word Jordan Peterson says. And I’ve been thinking recently about why that could be. Ordinarily, I can listen to someone prattling on and quickly get to the heart of what they are trying to express. That’s one of the skills you pick up as a journalist: You learn to quickly identify the core of a problem, the essence of what’s being said. You learn to filter out the noise—and to identify bullshitters. But with Jordan Peterson, once I’ve filtered out the noise, I don’t find a lot left to work with. And there’s another problem. He lies.
When he first began to speak about me, Jordan Peterson described me as “an amazing person.” This was around the time he called me on the telephone, expressing sympathy for the failed assassination attempt on me in February 2017, when I was wrongly accused of supporting child rapists. He offered to do a series of on-camera interviews with me. He described me publicly, and correctly, as “a trickster figure,” explaining that “trickster figures emerge in times of crisis. And they point out what no one wants to see. And they say things that no one will say.”
He continued: “[Milo’s] brave as can be…. And he’s unstoppable on his feet. He just amazes me. I’ve never seen anyone I don’t think—and I’ve met some pretty smart people—I’ve never seen anyone who can take on an onslaught of criticism and reverse it like he can.” Fast-forward to an on-stage interview with Bari Weiss in June 2018 at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Weiss is talking about about a professor who paired me with Hitler and gave us as examples of Very Bad Things. She alleges that I, the interracially married man, am indeed a racist. To which Peterson replies: “Well, possibly, yeah … I haven’t followed Milo that carefully.”
What happened? By his own definition, this is the way demagogues work: by listening to their audience and adjusting their responses accordingly. Why was Peterson suddenly going along with something he knew wasn’t true and rewriting history, pretending he didn’t know that much at all about someone he had on numerous occasions so intelligently explained? I realize that by asking this question, this you’re going to think I’m just wounded that someone I once admired has since soured on me. But that’s the thing. From the first time I heard Jordan Peterson speak, my nostrils picked up a whiff of sulfur in the air—and not just because he dresses in that awful, drab, monotonous Victoriana.
Read the whole thing there. The irony is that I began writing the book to make a certain case, and wound up being led by the evidence to wind up making Milo’s case in the end. Regardless of what you think of Milo, never underestimate his insight.
This Reddit thread full of Postulants of the 12-Rule Path waxing wroth will make for amusing reading afterwards, as apparently the only reason to criticize Jordan Peterson is envy, and Milo, Owen Benjamin, and myself are all just jealous of a mentally ill man with a Messiah complex. If the thread doesn’t convince you of the vital importance of this book, nothing will.