I really do think there’s a very definite before and after. At one point, he seemed to figure out exactly the cadence and wording that young men especially wanted out of a wisdom-dispensing fatherly figure. He got a lot of mileage out of whining about that one Canadian law proposal, at a time when transgendery things were (for better or for worse) less understood by most people. So even if you were sympathetic to them, there was a chance that what he was describing would raise your eyebrow. In my case I didn’t think I had anything against them, but he painted this picture of a law that could be easily abused, even if it was ostensibly in good faith. And he was careful not to comment on whether or not he thought it was one. Didn’t matter that the narrative he was peddling was pretty much fiction in the first place.

And then COVID broke his brain, and he very suddenly became terrible at hiding his power level. Part of his audience just knew him as that guy who wrote that book, but after selling increasingly political books titled “All you need to do to live (part 4, last one)” and “All you need to do to live (part 5, okay no this is the last one I promise.final)” that illusion also fell apart.

Right now most of the people who looked up to him at the time, even those who both still are (and even those who acknowledge) that they are right wing, think he’s lost the plot.

It’s not a great reassurance that those who let go of him may still have probably been swayed net-rightward by his stuff. But his spiral and widespread perception as a laughing stock, and as a clear example of lack of moral integrity on the right, is also a major piece of what he represents now. His red crying mug in his messy room has become a meme with a life of own. This is what he really is: a pompous, pontificating, fragile prick who can’t even use the good parts of his advice for his own sake. Even if it’s as simple as touching grass and cleaning up your shit.

I think he’s a fascinating case study of the grift economy. I genuinely think that if he was truly the conservalib old-soul psychology professor with an interest in the way Christian theology and vague folktale cosmology influence modern worldviews and narratives, he would definitely be someone I’d pay attention to. At least for his areas of expertise. I still yearn for someone like that to exist. Shitheads should not monopolize any topic.

But we know now that he was always mad as a hatter, that he was trying to get famous a decade before he actually did, and that his actual beliefs don’t deserve an iota of public recognition. That the ways he couched them are the sum total of what he was bringing to the table.

The mythological Jordan Peterson isn’t necessarily a bad guy, the original character, as played in like 2016. The actual one is a pathetic, and now failed cult of personality grifter, an enabler of great evil.

I hope he feels a fraction of the pain he has caused before he kicks it.

Edit: changed some things to be less winding.