Jordan B. Peterson's Blog, page 2

Senate Round Table September 23, 2024

I am speaking today as a clinical research scientist—an endeavour with which I have some familiarity, having conducted many such studies, and being aware of their difficulty, as well as a clinician and sometime philosopher of science.

We will start with the general, in this discussion, and move toward the specific.

Generally: It is vital to understand that science is an ethical, even philosophical/religious  enterprise. Why? Because the scientists who advance humanity inevitably operate within a a priori framework of faith. What are the elements of that faith?

That the world is orderly in its foundation, nature and spirit.That such order is understandable to the mind of man and woman.That the pursuit of such understanding is possible and laudable.That good itself will come of the pursuit of understanding.

A meta-principle underlies these more explicit rules: the understanding that the scientific aim must be true, for the truth to be revealed. This means that science aimed at career, prestige, professorship and funding, to say nothing of darker motivations—pride, revenge or the wish for destruction—is not science at all. Much of what purports to be science now is instead the garnering of personal credit, career advancement and economic gain that all derivative and essentially parasitic activity can temporarily achieve. This does not produce truth. We also should not be confusing  “medicine,” as currently taught and practiced, with “science.” The education of modern physicians may familiarize them with the basics of physiology and biology and the details of their specific practice. This is by no means the same teaches them how to conduct or evaluate scientific research, which is something that requires years of specialized training to manage.

Why am I making these points? So that we understand explicitly that aim and ethical orientation define the scientific pursuit; so that we pay enough to attention to establishing that aim and ensuring that orientation.

Given all that, we might then ask ourselves, “what would it require to make America truly healthy again, and to orient true scientists toward that aim?” A re-tooling of the research enterprise from the top down, as well as the bottom up, so that the goal was clear, the incentives aligned, and the most productive actors identified, properly rewarded, encouraged and capitalized. This could be facilitated politically by making the more specific goal clear. We could begin that by formulating the appropriate diagnoses: what are the major problems bedevilling the American people? Public health is clearly one such concern, and more so all the time—despite the extensive government spending in that domain; despite the negligible attention paid to the details of health research and practice by the political class.

American children are fat, diabetic and increasingly miserable. As they progress toward middle age, those not yet captured in childhood by obesity, insulin resistance, high blood sugar and inflammatory/immunological dysfunction are likely to suffer it then, with near certainty by the onset of a declining old age, and expensively so. What might we aim for instead? Slim, healthy, athletic, optimistic and courageous children; strong, psychologically integrated, generous adults; resilient, active, productive seniors, still contributing to their communities—combined with either or both of much less spending or much better results for the cost. How could this aim be accomplished, within the community of health-focused researchers and practitioners, and incentivized, politically?

America faces a multidimensional diagnostic conundrum. Its people suffer from a plethora of symptoms and syndromes: too-high and increasing body mass indices; rising blood sugar levels; associated risk for psychological disorder; immunological dysregulation that increases risk of neurological degeneration, cancer and heart disease—to name a few.

My daughter referred earlier to her terrible childhood experiences, inquiry and experimentation, communication of all that, and the social consequences, among a multitude of people with various chronic health conditions. What was her prime scientifically-relevant realization? The answer to this question: What do all fat, sick, unhappy people have in common? At least this: they all eat. How could that brute and singular fact be varied and studied?

Epidemiological studies associating any given dietary habit with some outcome of health inevitably fail, trying as they are to establish a correspondence between only two factors in a veritable sea of causal possibility. Science can only progress when such inquiry is simplified so that single variables of interest can be assessed for causal significance. This is difficult to manage, in the complex case of diet, but it no longer seems impossible. Why? Because of the possibility of radical simplification on the food consumption side.

Elimination diets offer a potential solution to this problem. Most make little sense, however, conceptually or scientifically. They eliminate foods in an oft-random and faddish manner, often because of the spoken or unspoken ideological concerns of their proponents. In addition, they are insufficiently simple. The range of foods involved must be reduced to the minimum for genuine analysis of causality to take place.

Ketogenic diets, which switch the body to fat metabolism, constitute a step in that direction. Restricting carbohydrate/sugar intake, they eliminate the contribution of the glucose-dependent metabolic pathway to obesity, insulin resistance/diabetes, and inflammation. The consequence of ketogenic intake can be analyzed simply by monitoring of weight, blood sugar, and assorted symptoms of inflammation, including those associated with psychological disorder.

Plant-free ketogenic diets push that simplification to its most radical extreme. Such exceptionally simple but still remarkably manageable diets can be healthily maintained for the weeks, months and even years that allow the diagnostic and treatment enterprise to proceed. They also have as a clear advantage their essentially satiating nature: no one on a carnivore diet has to go hungry. Almost everyone who “diets,” in the common sense, gains back all the weight they lost and more when they revert to their pre-“diet” habits. This is arguably less likely with a plant-free ketogenic diet, given the reduced hunger, although that remains to be demonstrated empirically.

What then is the most logical, upward-aiming scientific approach to the problem of American health? Identification of diet as the potential common mechanism; radical simplification of that diet; analysis of programmatic variation of that simplified diet, as food items are added in, by category, one by one. Those with chronic intractable illnesses could thus well be placed by default on a plant-free ketogenic diet for the several mere months that it would take to assess the consequences. This is a revolutionary but manageable proposision. Before it becomes a generalized standard of care, however, the relevant studies should and must be done. We have more than sufficient anecdotal data pertaining to the positive effect of such simplified diets—the testimony of thousands of people, which is sufficient not to constitute proof but certainly to justify the relevant hypotheses.

The goal is health. The approach is, generally, of upward aim and commitment to the truth. The specific strategy is restriction of all extraneous dietary variables, analysis of the consequences of that restriction, and then systematic variation with a return to a more varied diet. Simple. Elegant. Implementable. Necessary. The alternative, given the crisis that confronts us on multiple health fronts, is dreadful: the continued sickening of the American people, with all the unsustainable economic burden that sickening is and will continue to produce—the demoralization, decline in productivity and spiralling health care costs that are already mounting to the point of unsustainability. We could replace that miserable future with something much brighter and healthier if we had the moral and political will to do so.

The organized campaign to shut me up has filed five new complaints

It is certainly possible that Canadians are bored already by the endless saga of one contentious and “controversial” psychologist’s battle with the college that “regulates” his profession. But on the off chance you are still interested — as you should be, perhaps, if you are a member of such a profession, as is the case with one fifth of Canadians, or are or will be served by one (everyone else) — here is the latest.

My lawyers and I received not one but five (!) additional complaints last week — part of the endless litany of whining manipulative missives issued by the growing army of behind-the-scenes informer-rats who make it part of their life’s mission to hassle, annoy and prosecute, not even so much because of their ideological convictions, which are inevitably shallow and ill-thought-through, but because of the sadistic delight that accompanies the ability to harness themselves to the faceless and resentful because of it mid-level bureaucrats who increasingly rule our fair land.

What was my crime this time? Yet another tweet, with clear political intent, criticizing none other than Kamala Harris, who now has a chance to become the most powerful person in the world, despite doing nothing whatsoever to earn that opportunity. You might ask yourself, as well: what are the chances of five separate complaints, bearing on the same tweet, being submitted simultaneously, without some behind-the-scenes organizing by the very activists who are weaponizing the professional governing boards? Figure that out for yourselves. You can, and easily — despite the fact that apparently they cannot or more accurately will not see what is right in front of their faces.

Have you ever listened to Harris? If not, I would recommend doing so, painful as it might be, just so you know. For reasons unknown, she talks down to her audiences in a manner that anyone over four with any sense and anyone under with any self-respect would find, to say the least, grating — not to mention demeaning, presumptuous, disrespectful, haughty and Machiavellian. Here is the damning tweet in question:

I'll hazard a guess: retarded children. And they got that way from listening to people like her. A devouring mother, if there ever was one. https://t.co/l2rdCwEyDY

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 1, 2023

All five complainants claim, so wonderfully and compassionately, to be objecting only to my use of the word “retarded” — all, independently (of course), even though one says outright “I know I am not the only one who is imploring the CPBAO to take further action to stem this ridicule and disrespect to the industry, the people, and the unwritten rules of respectful representation of a profession.”

Why in truth are such individuals “concerned”? Because the language police types who increasingly and increasingly demandingly want, first, to appear as though they are good and that they care, without any cost to themselves and, second, to control absolutely everything everyone else says all the time. And the first reason is just an excuse for the second, and the second is nothing but a manifestation of their unlimited desire for power. If you cannot or will not see that you are a naïve or a blind fool or both. Apparently such an attitude now qualifies you to sit on the College board in question.

Apparently, I can’t say “retarded” and do not even know what to say otherwise any more when talking about children who are slow to learn, which is of course what “retarded” means, because the language police have made everything all eggshells in such situations and purposefully so. I knew perfectly well when I wrote that tweet that I would rub up the wrong way against exactly the sort of people who would threaten my livelihood and the equally power-mad invisible cowardly bureaucrats who enable them — as the members of the college have, yet again. This in spite of the fact that they have a responsibility to know better, as professionals who should understand Cluster B, psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian behaviour and who should be protecting their members and the public from such people.

The College of Psychologists and Behavioural Analysts or whatever they call themselves now (such a convenient time for an identity transformation) have the right to dismiss all such complaints as vexatious, frivolous and manipulative which is exactly and precisely what they are but refuse out of spite or incompetence or some toxic combination of both to do so. Thus my overt prosecution, and the lesson it holds for other professionals, continues.

Let us do some numbers, shall we, just to understand the situation better? There have been perhaps a dozen of such complaints levied against me. Let us call that ten, just to keep the math simple. How many people have listened to my words? At least a billion, if you count each view or listen as a person. That’s one complaint for each hundred million listeners. Canada itself has a population of only forty million. That means I had to speak to twice as many people as inhabit our entire once-fair country before a single person complained. What could you possibly say that would not inflame the imagination of one person in a hundred million? In any case, here is the blunt fact of the matter: 99.999999+ per cent of people believe that what I am saying is both true and worth listening to. 0.000001 per cent disagree. Nonetheless, the College sees fit to pursue the complaints of the minority. Why?

Another question, for the behind-the-scenes censors and bureaucrats of my governing board: you are apparently hell-bent on “investigating” every complaint levied against an active member of my profession. How many complaints about your own conduct did you receive, submitted in exactly the same manner they were levied against me, in the aftermath of the publicity related to my case? Will you release those numbers? How many of those did you investigate? I suspect it was at least hundreds. Perhaps it was thousands — at least before you switched your identity. Did you follow up those complaints, with regard to your own behaviour? If not, how exactly was the decision made to exempt yourselves from your own rules? Perhaps I am ill-informed: so let everyone know the numbers, then. Describe the process of decision. The case will be clear, and not in my favour. I asked you to provide me this information, in writing, some months ago, but that request was of course deemed not worthy of attention.

Another question: have you found someone, yet, who deigns to “re-educate” me? If you have, I have not been informed of it, despite repeated requests. I am ready as requested, since I have exhausted all legal routes.

Finally, with regard to Kamala Harris: I said something else, that those who regard themselves as my enemies and their enablers at the College objected to: that it seemed likely that those in her audience whom she was addressing in the manner properly reserved for retarded children were perhaps rendered that way by listening to her very words. What did I mean by that, pray tell?

I have watched the devouring mother types — so Gingerbread house to starving children on the outside, so will eat them in a flash on the inside — well-represented by Harris habitually speak down to people, their own children included. What is the inevitable clinical consequence for said children and, my implication, for people, in general, in thrall to their politicians? They are generally rendered weak and dependent. They become much less intellectually rigorous and much more timorous than they would have been had they been spoken to as if they were individuals of merit and possibility. That is precisely the point of such demeaning and infantilizing behaviour, which is easy for the naïve to confuse with genuine caring, which it is most decidedly not. Has the Harris/Biden pathological leftist Democrat/socialist crowd done the same to the general population? In my opinion, and professional opinion at that — yes. Resoundingly yes. And it continues.

Why should anyone care about any of this? Because our language is increasingly policed. Because the rules associated with that policing are increasingly unclear, and we break them, stated and unstated, at our increasing peril. Now we are literally at the point where if a professional (that would be me) dares to point out bluntly that a stunningly manipulative politician is being both demeaning and pretentious the professional body that governs the conduct of psychologists in Ontario can begin exactly the kind of lawfare action that has frozen the tongue of virtually every professional in Canada. I can count the exceptions on the finger of one hand. And what has happened to the professionals is coming for you, dear citizens of this now ever-so-nice land.

“Maybe you should not be so mean, Dr. Peterson: you are just picking on the marginalized and powerlessness. They only want to be treated with respect.”

That is all a lie. All these good-thinkers use their demented and careless compassion to mask their desire for unlimited power, not least over speech and thought. They do that in precisely the manner that the Machievellian and psychopathic always have. Now they are aided and abetted not only by the professional colleges in Canada, but by the craven and captured Supreme Court itself.

Civilization ends when the envious, bitter and power-hungry gain the upper hand — which they have forever done by claiming victimization. That is how they cover their drive to usurp, control and outright steal with the façade of care and concern. Psychologists — real psychologists, of which there now appear to be very few — are trained to see this, even though it is difficult and shocking, and they have a duty to report on it, when they see it. I see it. I am reporting on it — and the consequence of that is that exactly the people at whom I am pointing are targeting me, and in an organized fashion. Worse — unforgivably worse — my professional body, which is apparently either composed of the same sort of people or at least of those too blind to see, is enabling them.

Five more complaints, all nuisance, none the least bit associated with my clinical conduct. Four brought forward to my attention without objection by the cowards at the college.
The charade continues. The Alberta government has noticed, and made some moves to limit the arbitrary power of the governing bodies in question. That is something positive. The rest of Canada, including the Ontario Conservatives who should know better — and who think, to a not insignificant degree, the same way I do — continue with their silence, hoping… hoping for what? That the prosecution by the radical activists will end with me? This is a very dangerous presumption indeed.

Free speech, free thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of association: these do not die suddenly, anywhere they have taken fragile root, with a cataclysmic and dramatic bang, obvious enough to call the requisite rescuing heroes into being. They die, instead, in a series of pathetic defeats, none of which appear to be worth risking reputation to prevent. We are watching them die in front of our eyes. Everyone who is not asleep knows it.

We are becoming precisely the retarded children who can — and will — be talked down to, and who will take it and like it. I am pointing this out. Am I exaggerating, or blowing my own horn, or paranoid? Ask yourself this: are you still comfortable saying what you think in this land, glorious and free — even as comfortable as you were a mere decade ago? And if the answer is “no,” then ask yourself this: under such degenerating conditions, how long will you still be able to truly think? And what inevitably happens to those who cannot or will not think? And what happens to their children — and their societies?

Hell has forever been that infernal place where the informers have the upper hand.

Requiem for a Great Canadian

I first met Mr. Robert Rex Rafael Murphy (b. 1947) almost five years ago, when he interviewed me for REXTV, his podcast. This was at a time when no mainstream journalists—although Rex was hardly mainstream—would do so, given my essentially reprehensible nature and proclivity to actually say what almost everyone with any sense knew to be true. He was extremely fair and even-handed in his questions, just as you would hope a true seeker after what was genuine and real to be—but he was also far more than that. Mr. Rex Murphy was a man whose integrity and commitment to the uphill path was evident in every glance and utterance. He had the sharp visage and the gimlet eye of a bird of prey, although he was also kind and compassionate in exactly the manner that characterizes those who are truly good. Like other good people, in consequence, he saved his proclivity to extend a hand of care to the people who actually needed it, instead of waving his good-thinking proudly in the air like a banner of publicly-declared virtue. 

The time surrounding our first meeting is a bit blurred in my memory, as I was very ill when the interview occurred, and I do not remember what Rex and I did next to continue our relationship. I think maybe he came for dinner with my wife Tammy and son and daughter-in-law Julian and Jill and their little kids, as he did a number of times. In any case, however, we began to see more of each other, socially, and at public events and conferences. We  shared a small-town rural origin, a history of intellectual endeavour on the literary side, and the sharp sense of satirical humor that characterizes both Newfoundland and Alberta. This enabled us to embark on what developed into a true friendship. 

I returned the podcast favor to him six times, the last time less than a year ago. We mostly discussed the increasingly sorry state of Canada under our our increasingly sorry excuse for a Prime Minister, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau—perhaps the least qualified and most self-aggrandizing of all those who have held that posed. We traveled together during the Canadian leg of my Beyond Order tour, which brought the contents of my second popular book before a host of live audiences. I was privileged to have him as the opener for a number of those events, and as the interlocutor for the question period that followed. Had Rex not had a genius for the pen, and the capacity for political analysis of the most astute kind, he could have been a highly successful and much-touted stand-up comedian. His ten-minute intro always had the audience in stitches. Woe betide the politician upon whom the ruthless stare of Rex Murphy fell. He was the kind of man who saw exactly what was plain for all to see, and was unforgiving in his proclivity to point all that obviousness out to the men and women who refuse to acknowledge the blinding beams obscuring their own vision. 

Tammy and I also traveled with Rex to Newfoundland for five great days. We did this with the expert documentary crew from the American news and entertainment organization Daily Wire Plus, who will release the results in the very near future, for all Canadians and all those interested elsewhere to watch and enjoy. He warned us beforehand of the high likelihood of the terrible weather that stony island is known for, but we had nearly a week of straight sun. There was even a heat warning issued in St. John’s at the time of our visit—an event unprecedented in his or his fellow islanders’ memory. Rex joked about that the whole time, cursing us for our good fortune—and he was an excellent hand at a curse. What a remarkable time that was! Both my wife and I had like all Canadians of our generation and older known of Mr. Murphy for pretty much our whole lives, particularly as a consequence of his decades of work on CBC radio and then on TV on The National, where he spent ten years as a commentator and kept the whole bloody show afloat.  We  could not believe our luck: a guided tour of the ports and towns of Newfoundland, that hidden gem, with none other than the man whom anyone with any sense would most devoutly hope for as a guide! Perhaps everyone will enjoy the trip as much as we did when it is released. 

Turning the camera on Rex, as we did so often that week, was a continual treat. He was a deeply educated man, a master of the humanities, and had memorized far more poetry than most other educated men had read. This gave his speech a gravitas, cadence and rhythm that was shocking in its quality. What would the world be like if everyone learned to speak in such a manner! Every word he said, every phrase that came rolling out of his lips, every sentence he allowed his internal muse to craft was a masterpiece of intonation, connotation, and styling. He had been a debating champion at Oxford, in his youth, and his way with words was something truly admirable and remarkable to behold. I have had the opportunity to meet many stellar people in my life—some remarkable speakers among them—but no one with a greater capacity for spontaneous verbal verse like the redoubtable Mr. Murphy.

Rex was also a man of true humility, and not of the fake butter-will-not-melt-in-my mouth variety that too often typifies the famous striving a bit too hard and unbelievably to stay on the ground. Rex treated everyone well, and had great respect for the hard-toiling working class people who made up his family of origin, as well as the extended family of Canadians who were his admirers and fans. There was always a roar of approval when Rex hit the stage in his unexpected and unannounced appearances at my lectures. Most so-called ordinary Canadians have the sense to distinguish the real from the false—although they can be fooled by the odd true charlatan of charm and style—and Mr. Murphy was real right to the core. 

He was exactly the kind of star that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up, in principle, to produce—a genuine Canuck voice, a celebrity of the truly Canadian type, not flashy like the moviestars and talking heads of our American neighbours, with their Hollywood glitz, but sane and solid and clear-headed and honest and charismatic for all those reasons. There could have been more of his sort, in principle, if our national broadcaster had managed the courage of its hypothetical convictions. That was the point of the enterprise, after all. And how was he treated at that oh-so-elite and pretentious organization? His work was seldom promoted—virtually never, if truth be told. He was literally locked out of the washrooms that his advancing age made him more prone to need when he worked on the weekends at the downtown CBC headquarters in Toronto. And his reward, at the end of what was perhaps the most illustrious career in the history of our longserving and immensely self-aggrandizing public broadcaster? A forty-dollar gift certificate for Tim Horton’s, left on his desk to commemorate his retirement. 

This was a great comic story, as he told it—and that was the true gift left for him when he left that dismal and self-satisfied corporate world. I don’t know if Rex would appreciate me sharing it, private as he was, very much disinclined to complain. There is something in it, however, that increasingly typifies Canada itself, as it comes guiltily unwound—something in my opinion that cries out to be shared. Rex was a giant of character and conduct in a country that is uneasy with giants, regarding them, somehow, as unseemly, unCanadian in its deviation from beige mediocrity and littleness that we parade as a moral virtue, in contrast to the drama of noisy success characterizing our American allies. He therefore raised the ire—or, more accurately, the petty jealousy and envy—of the little men and women who depended upon him for whatever success came their way, but who were unwilling to note and be grateful for the source of its delivery. 

Rex was, finally, a lonely figure. He did not become a member of the pack of political acolytes that the press who cover the politicians so often join, enticed by their nearness to the power they so often crave for themselves; enticed in that manner to become the friends, allies or even promoters of those whose feet they are supposed to hold to the flame. He stayed aloof—not for reasons of arrogance, or even introversion, although he was essentially a solitary person—and he did so to ensure that his detachment and professional eye remained intact. He did so to deliver to the country for which he felt an immense and proper patriotism the truth it so desperately both needed and wanted. It was all the more a privilege, in consequence of those personal and professional proclivities, to be let in somewhat closely to the inner circle of his thoughts.

I will miss him immensely, as will my wife and as will all the Canadians for whom Rex was a necessary and salutary voice—a much better voice than our own, witty, cutting, challenging, sharp-tongued but never casually mean, striving to clarify and to learn, calling to order those would-be leaders who let their own pride and willful blindness get the better of them. The CBC is a desert wasteland without Rex Murphy. Our already blighted political landscape will in general be much more barren without his careful attention. Who could we possibly find to replace him—that man of tremendous charm, erudition, humility, perfect comic timing, sardonic and rapier wit, serpentine gaze, and the gentleness of a dove? Rex had a spine of titanium, the courage of a soldier, the respect for competence of the man of true humility, and the respect for words of the man who knows the value of genius, culture and tradition. He was a product of the hard times that made his home island and this country great, to the degree that it has every managed greatness. He was a man who made his way on the sheer grounds of merit that are so much denied today, in concert with the action of his iron determination and will. He was someone who showed us all what someone everyone was proud to call a Canadian could most truly be. We will all be much less with him gone; I will be much less, personally. It was a great honor to be someone he called a friend. I am very sad ineed that he has shuffled off this mortal coil. 

On Whale Carcasses

On whale carcasses, parasites and the rot of our institutions

There has been a spate of articles written lately—and indeed of books—by academics who have become disaffected by the happenings in our much-vaunted institutions of higher education. The most vocal and well-known of these include luminaries such as Jonathan Haidt, at Columbia, Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, and Steven Pinker, at Harvard. In Canada, Gad Saad at Concordia is likely the most effective and well-known of such critics, although Bruce Pardy, David Haskell, Julie Ponesse and Janice Fiamengo also spring quickly to mind. Many others currently operate and communicate behind the scenes, and in an increasingly organized manner.

I have for several years been participating, for example, in an email list known informally and satirically as the Dissident Herd of Cats, which now comprises about fifty participants from universities all across Canada and the US, with a handful of journalists thrown in just to keep the mud slinging. I believe that all the aforementioned Canadians are either part of that group or closely associated with it. A more recently acquired member, Professor Leigh Rivers, has recently published a couple of columns in this very newspaper detailing his experiences at the still-hard-science (for now) Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where I also served as an active professor in a different discipline for almost twenty years. Most of the discussion in that email group was private talk, in the beginning, as we found our feet, but the participants have become increasingly likely to identify themselves and to speak and write publicly and damn the consequences. All the people involved have determined despite the cancel culture and reputation-savaging that is part and parcel of the parasite strategy that the situation is so dire that even the risk of career has now become a moral requirement. This is something akin to war. 

The very fact of the existence of this dissident herd, something impossible to imagine five years ago, and its private and secret nature (up until now) is an indication of the absolute and utter rot of the universities. The most shocking example of that ideologically-possessed degeneration was, of course, the recent performances in the US Congress of the Presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT. These three “thought leaders”—all women; all flying, of course, the flag of toxic compassion—inadvertently exposed the comprehensive radical capture of their once-great institutions in a manner that was shocking to everyone (although not to themselves, convinced as they were even through that most painful of hearings that the rightness of their stance was something plain and self-evident).

Both Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magil of UPenn resigned deservedly in disgrace immediately afterward. Sally Kornbluth of MIT hung on, although she should not have, indicating that no performance however substandard will necessarily bring about the departure of a committed ideologue. She has definitely done MIT no favors: that immensely useful edifice of engineering prowess has become much worse for wear, much less meritocratic, much more insipid, mis-aimed and weak, under her oh-so benevolent reign. Even these resignations, however, with all that they signified—to say nothing of the appalling public statements that precipitated them—did comparatively little to truly alert the public to the seriousness of the occupation of their educational institutions from kindergarten through university by the leftist avatars of privileged resentment. Likewise, little was truly done by the institutions in question to address the rot itself, which has truly become (to borrow a hated phrase from the same radicals) systemic.

How in the world did we get to this point? To understand this, we will have to undertake a brief journey to the very bottom of things—a dreadful place, indeed, to go. I will start the exposition with a very ancient and strange story, derived from the foundational myth of the great civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, the Enuma Elish. This is literally the oldest intact story we have in our possession. Like all such truly ancient tales, it is predicated on a foundation of oral tradition and ritual that is even older—tens or even hundreds of thousands of years older. The story thus contains a maximally condensed and memorable portrayal of the structure and dynamics of the world, as they were, are, and always shall be. That is of course the function of genuine myth, and it accounts for the quality of eternal verity that characterizes the deepest of literature.

The world was created, according to the Mesopotamians, by the interaction of two forces: nature and culture, feminine and masculine, yin and yang, unknown or known; most fundamentally, chaos and order. Each of those forces is characterized in the Enuma Elish as a process—a spirit, if you will; even a deity. Chaos is a great female dragon, Tiamat, possibility, confusion and opportunity, the mother of all things.

Tiamat is the word from which the term tohu-va-bohu was later derived by the Hebrew people who wrote Genesis 1. That book, a foundational element of Western culture, is the account of God Himself creating from the waters of chaos over which His spirit broods the cosmic order that is habitable and good. That is an expression of an idea very similar to that expressed in the Mesopotomian creation account, and one that points to the dynamism between culture and nature comprising the human experience of the real. I say all that to indicate the universality of such concepts, as well as to indicate their depth and importance. Now Tiamat (nature, the feminine, possibility, and chaos) has a male consort or twin, Apsu. Not much is said about Apsu in the Enuma Elish itself, excepting the fact of his existence as the partner of possibility itself. This is perhaps because high culture was new enough at the time of Mesopotamia that little of its nature had become understood well enough to be encapsulated or portrayed in imagination or drama.

In any case, those ancient people at least understood that Apsu is the necessary order that in union with possibility and chaos continually gives rise to the world. He is the tribe, the family, the community and the social matrix. He is custom and the self-evidence of universally accepted value. He is, in a word, the patriarchy; the great work of the past. As such, the Apsu is the veritable bedrock of society; the vast storehouse of wealth, wisdom and structure that makes up the eternal and requisite inheritance of humanity. Apsu is what remains of the work our ancestors poured into the roads that surround us, the art in our museums, the books in our libraries, the words we learned as children, and the laws and principles that guide us forward—none of which we as beneficiaries created; all of which was given to us, as our privilege, upon the occasion of our birth.

Unfortunately, as time progresses, the first inhabitants of the world founded in consequence of the interactions and sacrifices of Tiamat and Apsu degenerate, carelessly and noisily. They begin to conduct their affairs in an increasingly clamorous, ungrateful, ignorant and resentful manner. Their prideful foolishness culminates in the slaying of Apsu himself. This is the death of God, by the way; the murder of the spirit of culture itself. The killers then attempt to live inside of or off of the remains of the resultant corpse. That’s the kicker, for our present purposes. 

The past is indeed a great carcass, the body of a whale, washed up on shore; a storehouse of great and undeserved value. It is entirely possible to live inside that storehouse, and to feast off its remains, while remaining entirely ignorant of and wilfully blind to the unlikelihood of its provision, and, as well, entirely unwilling to shoulder any responsibility concerning its maintenance, replenishment or expansion. This is precisely the strategy of scavengers and parasites, biologically speaking, which strip the magically provided flesh down to the bone and perhaps beyond. All, in the human case, for their own narrowly selfish hedonistic, power-mad, imprudent and infantile purposes.

Let us be very clear about this, as is now vital and necessary. The problem of storehouse of value versus predation/parasitism is fundamental, foundational. When the spirit of culture is overthrown by the plunderers, chaos most truly threatens. This is exactly what is next depicted in the Enuma Elish. When Apsu is carelessly killed, and his corpse violated and exploited, the anger of Tiamat, his partner, is aroused. She rises, in consequence, out of her slumbers and aims at the destruction of the world. This is a story echoed in the biblical account of the flood, eternally brought about by the blind, cowardly and venal sins of men.

Harvard is a whale carcass, inhabited by parasites. It is a $50 billion dollar endowment, with a university somewhat carelessly and secondarily attached to it. In its prime it was, as well, a storehouse of genuine brand value, an institution built very carefully by the diligent work of those who labored upward and properly in the past. It became in consequence of that extreme care a place of brilliant lecturers, creative and honest scientists, and highly qualified, ambitious and disciplined students. When I worked there in the 1990s, Harvard was still that justly esteemed place, although the rabble had already broken through the gate. It thereby constituted a brand of exceeding reputational value (exactly the value granted to those who graduated with a Harvard diploma) as well as the aforementioned economic giant.

Like its sister institutions, MIT, UPenn, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, Harvard was a treasured place—but simultaneously something ripe, in consequence, for the plunder. The same might be said in a somewhat lesser and typically understated and tentative Canadian manner of McGill or the University of Toronto or the dozen or so of our major centers of once-international-quality advanced education. The parasites—flying, without exception, the flags of the radical left—began to make their appearance and plot their takeover during the turn on tune in drop out hippie 1960s (a mantra developed at the very Department of Psychology I later served in at Harvard itself). All the virtues that made these places what they most truly were—all the disciplined striving, the upward aiming, the long apprenticeship, the concern for the truth, the high and discerning intelligence—were disdainfully dismissed by the parasitical invaders as nothing but the expression of arbitrary power and the manifestation of patriarchal and racist oppression. This was of course nothing but moral justification for their acts of theft: “If you obtained everything you have in consequence of your theft and misuse of power, it is only natural justice that I turn the tables and steal from you.” Of course, the self-interest in such a claim cannot be pointed out—not without the vengeance of the mad mob descended, as it continually has. 

Those who levied such accusations and whose victimized proclaiming was so cowardly accepted, abetted and even admired (“they’re so brave”) by the targets of their shaming had the doors to the warehouse guiltily flung open to them. They came flooding in, consequentially, multiplying the number of sham disciplines and positions, demolishing one by one everyone who opposed their ideological and self-absorbed acting or indicated its essentially narcissistic and shallow nature. This was the invasion of academia by the poseurs and charlatans of the permissive, infantilizing, accusatory mob; the radical feminists and pseudo-lesbians, the grievance studies “scholars,” the post-modernists allied so corruptly and unforgivably with the philosophical Marxists, the do-gooding activists, the rainbow-banner bearing hedonists of pride, even the outright communists—the whole bloody mess of those claiming no other motivation but compassion and care for the marginalized but actually doing nothing other than raping and pillaging the brand.

Thus we came to subsidize three generations of the absolute foes even of the culture that gave rise to them. Thus we enabled the mass action and even the thriving of those who without such largesse would have had difficulty providing for themselves even the basic needs and relationships of life. Consider this: How much trouble could one person hell-bent on producing nothing but such trouble manage, in a lifetime, if freed from the necessities of genuine productive and generous travail and provided with inexhaustible means to do so, all the while? Then multiply that error by a thousand—or by the tens of thousands. Imagine as well, while doing so, that something that rots from the head down does so in the most complete and poisonous manner possible. That is exactly what we did, in the West, and the consequence of that is now facing us, shocked though we may be to be there. When the source is polluted, everything downstream is poisoned. That is what has happened. That is why everything appears to be corrupting simultaneously. Hence the increasing unreliableness of professional organizations and governing bodies everywhere; the sad and degenerating state of the legacy media, which with few exceptions does anything but lie; and the pathetic virtue-signaling and doom-saying hypocrisy and betrayal of the political elite. The heads of the hydra that have always been said to envelop the world during its decline appear everywhere at once. That is the death of the center and the victory of the margin—the very victory that the barbarians who stormed the gates promised so forthrightly and colorfully to deliver. 

The generations who lived immediately prior to us built up tremendous storehouses of value in the peaceful and productive aftermath of World War II. They left those places of value unguarded. In consequences, the vandals and the Visigoths came to occupy, and will continue to do so, in an ever-worsening and more comprehensive manner, unless they are attended to, and forthrightly stopped. This is beginning to happen. I met just last week, for example, with an academic from the UK—an outstanding scholar of classics. He left his tenured position as a full professor at Cambridge (!), once one of the world’s absolutely top-tier places, because he believes that the universities are so rotten they simply cannot be saved. He has instead taken a position at Ralston College in Savannah, an institution I serve as chancellor, which has been established as a bulwark against the present and coming flood. My daughter and I and our team will soon be launching Peterson Academy, an online educational institution, for the same reason: the parasite load in the conventional institutions has simply become so high that they cannot be saved. We have attracted dozens of the best remaining intellectuals to offer their work on the new platform. We hope to cut the cost of a bachelor’s degree equivalent education by 90%, and to simultaneously radically increase its quality and reach. There is no reason why we cannot now effectively educate the world. There are other such efforts in the works. The most well-known and advertised is, perhaps, the new University of Austin in Texas, founded in part by the now-independent journalist Bari Weiss, once of the New York Times, another august institution entirely corrupted by the purveyors of nonsense, resentment and unearned moral superiority who (mis) educated its journalists.

Could the condition of modern academic institutions truly be that dire? Consider the recent and arguably analogous case of Twitter, Elon Musk’s recent purchase, a very large and powerful institution, and a stellar example of invasion by the woke mob (something that has also happened, by the way, to Disney and Google). Mr. Musk fired something approximating eighty per cent of the employees of his newly and bravely purchased company. Why? Because they did nothing but consume resources. Actually—that is not a sufficiently damning judgement. The people Musk chased away not only devoured even more than they consumed, within the corporation that employed them, but undermined and purposefully so the stability of the surrounding society itself, all the way to its free-speech bedrock. With far less counterproductive staff, the company now known as X performs much better, and could yet grow into the dominant global social media and service force. I would not in any case bet against Mr. Musk, who appears to have the talons and fangs necessary for the job. The universities are in the same state as pre-Musk Twitter—no; worse. 

What would then have to happen in such places for an equal turnaround to occur? First, half the students would have to go. That would be all the students who lack the ability and the vocation for specialized intellectual endeavour, who have no idea why they are there, and who are putting in at best a half-hearted effort. The situation is even more serious on the administrative side. Ninety percent of that lot should go, without question, as well as the majority of the ideologically-addled and incompetent faculty. The latter have not only lost their courage, while bowing to the administration and then to the woke mob. They have also allowed their journals to become corrupted and their science and research programs to degenerate into propaganda produced for careerist self-promotion. The government granting agencies, with their emphasis on the parasitical trinity of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity, have become equally dishonest and counterproductive—and equally have to go. It is now impossible to obtain “research funding” without writing an oath of fealty to the radical left and having that accepted by the very enemies of the true university and scientific truth-seeking enterprise. The rules for doing so, of course, change year to year, becoming with every iteration more incomprehensible and more extreme: this serves not only to indoctrinate (as participating in the process of propaganda, however unwillingly, still corrupts) but to identify those willing to become slavish enough to turn any which way the evil wind blows. 

What has to go, along with that? All the contemptible self-aggrandizing political activism and praying in the streets; all the pathetic infantilization of students and faculty; all the resentment for the very “capitalism” upon which the universities absolutely depend; all the turn away from objectively-defined and race-and-status-blind merit; all the “affirmative action”; all the idiot drunken hedonism that characterizes student life, particularly since the 1960’s. All of it—and I mean all—because any bit of it is the evil seed from which the current evil fruit has grown, and any left in the ground will merely sprout again in the same manner. All this radical pruning is very unlikely to occur, however, although some self-correcting collapse is inevitable—pruning unlikely to occur because we do not have the spine, ability and civilized viciousness of someone like Musk; collapse inevitable because the manner in which these institutions now conduct themselves will not prove economically or practically sustainable. 

Why then are the voices of conservative and genuinely liberal protest increasingly emerging among a small but growing minority of academics? Because the captain is truly intoxicated, and the ship is truly in peril. An increasing number therefore now see that they have more to lose by remaining silent than by pointing and speaking out. Expect the clamor on the traditionalist side to increase, as it is now, as the unsustainability of the rotten institutions becomes something increasingly manifest and frightening. What might we as forthright individuals do, in parallel,  in such a circumstance, when the walls we have relied on to protect us have been breached and the barbarians have entered the gates? 

We could take a hint, once again, from the Enuma Elish. In that tale, when order has been slaughtered and chaos is once again on the rise, the hero Marduk arises in the midst of the threatened regime, confronts the dragon and reconstitutes the world. How? He pays attention: Marduk has eyes that encircles his head and look every which way. He determines to speak, as well, the magic words of truth. Thus armed, he is the force that can confront chaos itself, put all things in their correct place, and redeem the world. A modern analog? The pilgrimage of the puppet Pinnochio, well-known to all since the classic Disney movie. That youthful but stalwart hero performs a similar task, when he rescues his lost father from (where else?) the belly of a whale—the giant carcass in which the benevolent creator Gepetto is all-too-unconsciously dwelling, in consequence of the disappearance of the son who should properly be a visionary and a man of integrity. In managing this daring feat of rescue, the once-marionette transcends his sequentially presented roles as narcissistic actor (are you listening, Justin Trudeau (?)), liar, neurotic victim and delinquent braying-jackass hedonist and slave, and rescues the traditional values from the abyss into which they have descended. In so doing, he aligns himself with the calling of his conscience, the redoubtable Jiminy Cricket, the still small voice within, and makes himself real.

This is what the appallingly few academics with the courage to be and to become are attempting to manage—those who have already marked themselves publicly as heretics to the DEI victim/victimizer hypocrites and frauds, as well as the Dissident Herd of Cats referred to earlier, communicating and planning as they are how best to proceed in the cowed, reputation-savaging and idol-worshipping universities. In consequence, perhaps something might yet be retrieved from the waste that the devouring mob will leave in the aftermath of their feast. The fools who accuse and despise are leaving a great treasure on the table. The wise might well seize the opportunity, gather it up, multiply it and prepare it for new distribution. There’s a lesson here for everyone out in the real world, too, beyond academia, now marred and lessened by the workings of the Luciferian intellectuals: get your house in order, gird your loins, look at the mess that is making itself manifest in front of you, wherever you are, say your piece, and get to work.

Before the goddess of chaos makes her full appearance—and prevails.  

 

Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven

Written By Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson

“Our identity is fractal, hierarchical, subsidiary. Proper responsible participation in all its levels provides life with purpose, meaning, security, hope, and adventure.”

In this paper, Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson unpack the growing polarisation of identity between the poles of the atomised individual and totalising state, and how subsidiarity offers an alternative, richer vision of identity and belonging.

Read the Research Paper

Summary of Research Paper

The question of identity haunts us, underlying our political excesses and extremes. As individuals, in the absence of a firm identity, we become adrift. We are in need of something capable of uniting our inner selves, and our interests and endeavours with others, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably.

The modern world has increasingly understood identity as a duality between an idiosyncratic individual, and an ever-totalising collective. These two tendencies have grown simultaneously, on the one hand the worship of particularity—the exception, difference—and on the other, a growing bureaucratic state and global systems with an authoritarian bent, necessary to protect increasingly fragmented individuals from each other.

The result has been the slow but persistent erosion of intermediary identities: the family, communities, religious affiliations, clubs, and the nation—as the individual sees these intermediary identities as constraining his or her freedom. The growing collective sees these intermediary participations as impure visions of itself, competing with its own totalising identity. We are left with hopeless and lonely individuals facing an increasingly controlling and invasive state.

There is another vision of identity, reflected in many of the traditional societies of our world and its natural patterns. It is what we could call subsidiary identity. Subsidiary identity is understanding that as individuals, we are already a bringing into one of all the different thoughts, feelings, and psychological micro-personalities within us. It is our very capacity to join the multiple into one which becomes a mirror of how we are parts of higher, broader identities, within our family units, our communities, our cities, and our religious communion.

So too, our families are themselves unified agents in the building of cities, and our unified cities are real identities forming nations, with each level existing as its own level of reality, autonomy, but ultimately always giving itself up into higher participations. In this vision, we soon realise that the highest vision of identity and participation is not government, though governments are necessary, but in the very virtues which make it possible to exist together in harmony in the first place, and ultimately the transcendent Good itself.

To be a citizen is not to be a citizen of an abstract collective, it is to be a parent, a friend, a neighbour. It is not in the constant suspicion of any common identity, but it is in celebrating and remembering our immediate bonds, our stories, that we can be anchored properly in the world. By aligning our vision beyond particularities, by aiming towards higher virtues—but also in full knowledge of difference, of exceptions, in compassion to those who do not fit with our ideals—we maintain our subsidiary identities in service of the highest Good.

 

Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson

Jonathan Pageau is an artist, writer, and public speaker. He is a pioneer in the revival of Liturgical Art for the 21st century. Through his podcast The Symbolic World, he fosters the rediscovery of symbolic thinking and a vision for re-enchantment in the world.

Dr Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 until 1998, he served as Assistant and then Associate Professor of psychology at Harvard. Dr Peterson has written the global bestsellers Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

 

 

Pro-Hamas protesters are sanctimonious psychopaths

We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread demonstrations across the West supporting – explicitly or implicitly – the terrorists of Hamas. Some of the most shocking scenes unfolded in London, a city often held up as a beacon of immigration-fueled multiculturalism – one that has now seemingly lost its shine.

Yet, troublesome though the impact of such accelerated immigration may be, it is by no means the main reason why Hamas has acquired so much support. It is instead the careless naivete and sheer blind heedlessness of the West in dealing with one of its most deadly national foes – Iran – in combination with the destructive ideological reaction presently threatening our culture to the core.

The tyranny of the Iranian mullahs

We like to believe, in our oft-unearned comfort, that differences in metaphysical and religious outlook can simply be overlooked in favour of the humanity we all hypothetically share. In consequence, we fail to seriously consider the very real differences that still exist between people (especially at their worst), and which cause the eternal conflicts and predatory and parasitic criminal activity that keep so much of the world poor, miserable and mean. We believe we can wave the magic wand of goodwill, and have all such variance in opinion and outlook vanish at the borders, leaving nothing behind but the much-vaunted “diversity” whose pursuit has become a moral imperative – or else.

We also foolishly underestimate the persistence, strength and cunning of those who regard our virtues and freedoms as vices and historical accidents. Some reports have Hamas leaders or former leaders taking up residence in London, or operating in the West with little genuine constraint. Regardless of the truth of those specific claims, or the clear and present danger posed by those leaders, there can be little doubt that the serpentine authoritarian operatives of our enemies are now causing as much disruption as they possibly can everywhere in the major cities of the democratic world.

The most germane example is currently provided by the tyrants of Tehran. Are we really too stupid to detect the presence of the Iranian pseudo-religious thugs behind these massive demonstrations, taking full advantage of the current conflict in Israel, which they did everything possible to bring about? It has long been to the advantage of the totalitarians who wish to cling pathetically to their power in the Middle East and elsewhere to use the Palestinians as cannon-fodder and goads in the side of the Jewish state, upon whom everything throughout time can so conveniently be blamed.

We need to remember that the Iranian mullahs are on the ropes. They are hated, with a vengeance, by their own citizens, and deservedly so. They are, in addition, existentially threatened by the Abraham Accords, and are doing everything in their power to discredit and destroy them. These agreements, long deemed impossible by the entrenched and intransigent State Department bureaucracy, brought peace and the possibility of cooperative prosperity to certain Arab/Muslim countries (the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan).

The much more powerful Saudis also welcomed and facilitated these initiatives behind-the-scenes. We therefore missed a stellar and historically unprecedented opportunity to bring them into the pro-Israel fold, mostly because of Democrat unwillingness to credit Donald Trump’s administration with any positive achievements whatsoever.

This is tragic, as the Abraham Accords profoundly undermined the narrative of “Muslims against everyone else” (most focally Jews); a narrative the bloody psychopaths always and inevitably depended upon to motivate the worst of themselves and their followers. Thus, it is in the clear interest of the Iran “leadership” to force the Israelis to defend themselves, using all due force, so that their military and strategic prowess can be spun as even more evidence of their oppressive and colonial ways.

Which brings us precisely to the central problem: the vengeful narrative of victim and victimiser that has infected broad swathes of the Western world.

A new front in the culture war

Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matter and January 6 protests and, most recently and seriously, the massive aforementioned pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Disturbing as the dark cloud of the latter may well be, it came with the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of the culture war: a revelation shocking to so many. How could it possibly be that so much of Western academia (as well as progressives, more generally) could support the very movement behind the worst planned attack on Jews since the Holocaust?

To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between postmodern philosophy and Marxism; something particularly, although not uniquely, attributable to one Michel Foucault, currently the world’s most-cited academic.

Foucault, who was the very embodiment of resentful bitterness (not least because of the alienation he suffered due to his sexual proclivities) devoted his tremendous intellect to the task of reducing all human motivation to a single dimension: that of power. For Foucault and his idiot quasi-Nietzschean followers, there is no reality other than that of compulsion and force: no responsibility, no rights, no truth, no heaven above nor hell below – nothing but the all-against-all of Thomas Hobbes.

Even those claiming to be motivated by, say, the intellectual tradition, the liberal ethos, or even the much-vaunted current Goddess of All-Encompassing Compassion are, according to the postmodernists, pursuing nothing but their own narrowly self-centred aims. Loathas they were to accept the existence of any uniting story – any “supreme meta-narrative,” in the jargon – they were eager to adopt this infinitely broadened formulation of the arrogant, resentful Marxist victim/victimiser narrative that was particularly attractive to so many major French intellectuals of the time. Thus – and predictably – they swallowed the proverbial camel, while straining at a gnat.

History, for Marx, was best understood as the eternal battle between the corrupt haves and the innocent, virtuous and oppressed have-nots – the now-cliched bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The world he proclaimed was thus pure conflict: two classes of inevitable enemies, eternally vied off against one another for control of the economic spoils (the only domain of value posited to exist, once all the religious and metaphysical “opiate of the masses” had been properly and progressively stripped away). This has morphed, under the pressure of the postmodern de-constructive ethos, into the meta-Marxism that similarly proclaims two classes of humanity, but in even starker form: the victims (those from whom the victimisers have robbed) and the victimisers (those who have everything – or anything at all).

The dichotomy is no longer merely economic, as it was under Marx. Instead, it characterises every conceivable dimension of categorisation, sexual, gendered (so-called), religious, ethnic, racial, athletic, aesthetic and meritorious. Everywhere there is the dynamic of power, and the inequality it inevitably produces; everywhere there are evil oppressors and the virtuous oppressed. This is the standard doctrine of the “elite” universities. From such sources, it has disseminated everywhere – and is opposed by faculty, students, administrators and now common citizens at their great peril.

The festishisation of victimhood, and its consequences

In this bleak existential landscape, there are no sovereign citizens of ineffable essential worth, exchanging rational opinions in the attempt to bring clarity, productivity, generosity and truth to the fore. There are no divinely-souled human beings, capable of civilised cooperation and competition. There are merely competitors in an irreducibly ideological realm, clamouring for arbitrarily-granted attention and fighting for power – with the worst of those promoting the veritable language of freedom, rights, responsibility and human dignity for no other reason than their narrow self-aggrandisation.

There is no property: only theft. There is no merit: only the definitions of merit that serve the powerful. There is no intrinsically-meaningful human struggle. Instead, there are the brief dominance-motivated battles of mortal material beings, struggling in pointless quasi-Darwinian competition, trampling in the rush to seek status on the heads of the arbitrarily less-fortunate others.

A more comprehensively destructive, nihilistic and inevitably sadistic doctrine has never been imagined; neither has a system of thought ever so clearly and unapologetically justified the use of force and compulsion. Remember: if nothing exists but power, it is only the fool who fails to use it.

In this nightmarish world, there are only two social positions: you and your group (for there are no “individuals” in this conceptual scheme) are either victims or victimisers. This is a very simple theory, and something therefore profoundly attractive to the wilfully blind, stupid and ignorant. It is equally convenient, however, to the bitter and resentful – and, therefore, downright irresistible to those who combine both sets of dubious attributes.

The central venomous claim? If you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimiser. If you are not, you are a victim.

A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are, as well, only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on “philosophical” grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimiser, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.

If you are a victimiser, after all, you have no moral standing whatsoever. No punishment is therefore undeserved, or sufficiently severe. This is true even if you are “only” a member of a victimising group, and have done nothing wrong other than that, because “individual” is a category that within the postmodern philosophy no longer exists.

If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable – even morally required – even if you are merely a self-aggrandising, vindictive and hypocritical “ally” of some marginalised group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door to the worst possible actions by the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern Left – most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the their most resentful fantasies.

‘Victimisers’ and its impact on the Israel-Gaza conflict

What does this mean, specifically, for understanding the Israel-Gaza conflict and the world-wide demonstrations following in its aftermath?

Well, few would disagree that Israel is a highly successful nation. It is a society that hyper-values intellectual accomplishment and success. Does this make it admirable? Not to those for whom any sign of success whatsoever indicates the dynamic of victimiser and victim. Not to those who would rather assume that such success must be a consequence of some behind-the-scenes conspiracy. Ability, effort and merit do not exist, remember, in the postmodern meta-Marxist world. Historic attacks on Israel and its citizens jives in more modern times all-too-well with the radical Leftist insistence that success is nothing more than the evil consequence of the evil capitalist system in which it arose.

The consequent inevitable conclusion that the disproportionately successful Israelis must then be uniquely exploitative turns out to be very convenient for the Iranian leader-thugs, eternally hoping to deflect the attention away from their own unforgivable failings.

There are plenty of Arabs or Muslim oppressors for the truly “compassionate” folk on the Left to concern themselves with. There are many truly oppressed people. Take for example the devastated inhabitants of Sudan, where various militias operate brutally and invisibly – completely off the radar of many virtue-signallers in the West. The same might be said even more broadly of the women of Iran, the oppression of whom is a clear hallmark of psychopathic brutality.

Where are the howls of outrage from the Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge do-gooders about the plight of the veiled in that brutal state? Even Amnesty International, most notable now for its woke foolishness, has called without success on the world to make its objections to such things noted.

Even if the Palestinians were victimised – and some case can be made for that – they are certainly not alone, and it is hard to put forward a credible argument that the Jews of the region don’t deserve at least equal a priori sympathy, especially given how many are direct descendants of those who went through some of the worst catastrophes in the history of the world under the Nazis – something acknowledged by the UN when it announced an independent Jewish state (and, lest it be forgotten, a corresponding Arab state) in 1948.

A warning from history

The danger of the victim/victimiser narrative, as such, cannot be overstated. It was its promulgation that engendered Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its spread that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the more recent absolute catastrophe of the Rwandan massacres. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the first victimiser, deserving of nothing less than a violent death.

The instinct operating within the doctrine driving such divisions is aimed not at the forgiveness and peace it constantly claims but the punishment and mayhem that it more truly and most deeply desires. This is a motive in keeping that famously diagnosed by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he accused the intellectual socialists, in particular, of not so much loving the poor as hating the rich. Such simple and convenient identification of oppressor provides the murderous with precisely the balm to conscience required to despise and torture, with the best of conscience.

There are now hundreds of thousands marching for the demonisation of Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the actions of the Iranian autocrats. They would have little purchase, however, if not enabled by the wretched, simple-minded, prideful “intellectual” Western ideologues, fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression.

This has happened time and time again in history. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow those who are envious of their success to rule, or even to move among us unimpeded in their actions, we are most truly laying our necks, as well as theirs, on the line. We will pay the dread piper, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins.

Enough stupidity and blindness. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They are inside – inside our cities, our civilisation, and our souls. Too many clamour, in consequence, to once again punish Jews. The bloodthirsty desires and doctrines motivating and justifying such behaviour must be identified, understood and rejected, before things get seriously out of hand – and that could happen sooner and with more devastating force than even the most pessimistic among us might be inclined to think.

Anti-Semitism and the PostModern MetaMarxists

Pro-Hamas protests: Victims, victimizers and sanctimonious psychopaths

We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread pro-Palestine demonstrates across the West (pro-Hamas, more truly)—particularly, although not only, in the London which is now the home of so many new immigrants. This has led to much predictable hand-wringing on the part of those who have been warning against the widespread remaking of the culture that is bound to accompany such widespread transformation of race, ethnicity and religion. Troublesome though too-rapid immigration and and oh-so-pristinely motivated policy that enables it may well be, it is by no means the main issue at hand. 

There are many reasons why the Palestinian cause—and, therefore, the cause of Hamas—has attracted so much support. Some of it has to do with the careless naivete and sheer blind heedlessness of the West. We like to believe that differences in mere metaphysical and religious outlook can be easily overlooked, in favor of the shared humanity in which the promoters of the multi-culturalism doctrine do not even believe. In consequence, we fail to take seriously the very real differences between people (especially at their worst) that cause the eternal conflicts and predatory and parasitical criminal activity that keep much of the world poor, miserable and mean. We think we can wave the magic wand of goodwill, and all such variance in opinion and outlook will just vanish at the borders, leaving nothing behind but the much-vaunted “diversity” whose pursuit has become an absolute moral imperative—or else. 

We also foolishly underestimate the persistence, strength and cunning of those who regard our virtues and freedoms as vices and historical accidents. Some reports have Hamas leaders or former leaders literally taking up residence in London—and certainly otherwise operating with little true constraint. Regardless of the truth of the specific claims, or the clear and present danger of those leaders, there can be little doubt that the serpentine authoritarian operatives of our enemies are now causing as much disruption as they possibly can everywhere in the major cities of the democratic world. The most germane current example is, obviously, that of the tyrants of Iran. Are we genuinely too stupid to note who, as well as what, is truly behind these massive demonstrations? 

It is the Iranian pseudo-religious thugs who are taking full advantage of the current conflict in Israel, which they did everything possible to bring about and promote. It has long been to the advantage to the totalitarians who wish to cling pathetically to their power in the Middle East and elsewhere to use the Palestinians as cannon-fodder and goads in the side of the Jewish state upon whom everything bad in the area and throughout time can so conveniently be blamed, as well as the United States, which has been such a reliable Israel supporter. 

We need to remember, although we won’t: the Iranian mullahs are on the ropes. Their own citizens hate them with a vengeance, and deservedly so. They are in addition thoroughly threatened by the Abraham Accords, which they are doing everything in their power to discredit and destroy. These historic agreements, long deemed impossible by an entrenched and intransigent State Department bureaucracy, brought peace and the possibility of cooperative prosperity to certain far-reaching Arab/Muslim countries (the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan). The much more powerful Saudis were supporting these initiatives, behind the scenes: we missed (that’s you, President Biden) a stellar and historically-unprecedented opportunity to bring them into the pro-Israel fold, mostly because of Democrat unwillingness to credit the Trump administration with any positive achievements whatsoever. C’est la vie—but here we are. All this laudaboe progress out of the 12th century risks fatally undermining the Muslims-against-everyone-most-particularly-the-Jews narrative that the bloody psychopaths inevitably depend upon to motivate the worst of themselves and their followers. Thus, it is in the clear interest of the Iran “leadership” to put the Jews in Israel on the offensive, so that use of their military and strategic prowess and ability in self-defense can be spun as—as what? That brings us precisely to the central problem.

Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matters, with the January 6th protests, and, most recently and seriously, with the massive and aforementioned pro-Palestine protests wracking our major cities. Disturbing as that dark cloud may well be, it has the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of that culture war, which has come as a shock to many including the liberal Jews recently called out, albeit somewhat awkwardly, by Elon Musk. How could it possibly be that so much of Western Academia (as well as the progressives, more generally), could come out in support of the very movement that caused what was arguably the worst planned attack on Jewry since the Holocaust? 

To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between post-modern philosophy and Marxism. We’ll concentrate most particularly on Michel Foucault, who is currently the world’s most-cited academic, and his joker Jacques Derrida. Foucault, the very embodiment of resentful bitterness (not least because of the alienation he suffered because of his sexual proclivities) spent his whole life bending his supreme intellect into knots reducing  all human motivation to that of power and its associated “repression.” 

For Foucault and his idiot quasi-Nietzschean followers, there is no reality other than that of  compulsion and force: no responsibility, no rights, no truth, no heaven above nor hell below—nothing but the all-against-all of Thomas Hobbes. For Foucault and his ilk even those claiming to be motivated by, say, the intellectual tradition, the liberal ethos, or even the much-vaunted current Goddess of All-Encompassing Compassion Herself are in truth pursuing nothing but their own narrowly self-centred aims. Although the post-modernists famously evinced a radical skepticism regarding the validity of so-called meta-narratives or single uniting stories, they were not at all loathe to adopt this much broader version of the arrogant, resentful Marxist victim/victimizer narrative that was particularly attractive to so many major French intellectuals of the time. 

History, for Marx, was best understood as the eternal battle between the corrupt haves and the innocent, virtuous and oppressed have-nots, the now-cliched bourgeoisie and proletariat. The world, for Marx, was in consequence pure conflict: his two classes of inevitable enemies faced off against each other for control of the purely economic spoils that made up all the true and real concern of true and genuine human beings (once all the religious and metaphysical “opiate of the masses” had been properly and progressively stripped away). This has morphed, under the pressure of the post-modern deconstructive ethos, into the meta-Marxism that likewise proclaims two classes of humanity, in even starker form: the victims (those that have anything and everything) and victimizers (those from whom the victimizers have stolen). This dichotomy is no longer merely economic: it characterizes every conceivable dimension of categorization, sexual, gendered (so-called), ethnic, racial, athletic, aesthetic and meritorious. Everywhere there is power dynamics, and subsequent inequality: everywhere there are evil victimizers and virtuous victims. This is the standard doctrine of the “elite” universities—faculty, students and administrators oppose it at their great peril. From those sources, it has spilled everywhere. 

In this landscape of existential—and, eventually and inevitably, real and active terror—there are no sovereign citizens of ineffable essential worth, exchanging rational opinions in the attempt to bring clarity, productivity, generosity and truth to the fore, capable of civilized cooperation and competition. There are merely competitors in an irreducibly ideological landscape, clamoring for attention and fighting for power—with the worst of those developing and employing even the veritable language of freedom, rights, responsibility and human dignity for no other even hypothetically possible reason than their own narrow self-aggrandization. There is no property: only theft. There is no merit: only the definitions of merit that serve the powerful victimizers. There is no intrinsically-meaningful human struggle: there is only the brief dominance-motivated battles of mortal material beings, struggling in pointless quasi-Darwinian competition, getting ahead only by trampling on the arbitrarily less fortunate others. A more comprehensively destructive, nihilistic and inevitably sadistic doctrine has never been imagined; neither has a system of thought ever so clearly and unapologetically justified the use of naught but force and compulsion. If there is nothing except power, only a fool fails to use it. 

In this nightmarish world (most truly that whose immediate precursors brought about the utter horrors of Mao and Stalin) there are only two social positions to occupy: you (and your group—there are no “individuals” in this conceptual scheme) are either victims or victimizers. This is a very simple theory. It is therefore something irresistibly attractive to the wilfully blind, stupid and ignorant, and also very convenient, to the bitter and resentful: if you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimizer. If you are not, you are a victim. A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white categorization: there are only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are goodness incarnate—as is supposed to be self-evident, not least because of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, a predatory parasite, and rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment (this becomes a veritable moral command). 

Here’s a codicil, or consequence, of that demented and dangerous “theory.” This all means that victimizers can be identified by nothing more than their “success.” Remember: there is no merit, only competing claims to ability, in a competitive zero-sum landscape. There is no property or ownership—only the dominance over material goods exerted by the oppressors. Thus, those who have—those who have anything, mind you, that anyone else does not have—are therefore oppressors, at least along that dimension of evaluation. This is true of any form of success whatsoever, in any guise, by any all possible standards. Thus attractiveness, intelligence, youth, age, wealth, education, social standing and much more (race, ethnicity, religious belief) become dimensions of exploitation and nothing more. The fact that this makes literally who has any more than absolutely nothing an victimizer is always glossed over, until the mob shows up—as it has. 

If you are a victimizer, remember, you have no moral standing whatsoever, and no punishment is either undeserved or too severe. This becomes true even if you are “only” a member of a victimizing group, and have done nothing wrong, other than that, as “individual” is a category that within the post-modern philosophy no longer truly exists. If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable—even morally required—even if you are merely a self-aggrandizing and vindictive “ally” of some marginalized group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door for worst possible actions of the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern left—most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the blackest of all possible resentful fantasies. 

What does this mean for Israel, re Hamas, Gaza and Palestine? Well, the Jews are successful. This is the source of their continual downfall. Good, properly-behaving minorities languish, performing poorly in silence. The Jews, with their social hyper-valuing of intellectual accomplishment and success, continually and irrepressibly outperform. Does this make them admirable? Not to the eternally resentful, to whom any sign of success is precisely the sign of the victimizer. Not to those who would rather assume that such success must be a consequence of the behind-the-scenes conspiracy that the Jews are always accused of fomenting, rather than a result of genuine ability and effort. Those don’t exist, remember?—not in the postmodern Meta-Marxist world.

And don’t we remember that the Jews were pilloried precisely as parasites by the National Socialists, planning to annihilate them, precisely because their success, economically and even in integrating, was nothing but proof of their theft and canniness? Doesn’t that hypothesis fit in all-too-perfectly with the radical leftist idea that success, per se, is nothing but than the consequence of the unjust compulsion and force that also characterizes “capitalism”? Isn’t it just ever so stunningly convenient—and dangerous—that such a proposition dovetails with the story of resentful, entitled narcissistic failures everywhere, looking to justify their own pathetic and often self-imposed misery, seeking desperately for a target for their consequent spite and hatred? And just how wonderful is it that the victim/victimizer narrative morally justifies the destruction of those whose success rankles so bitterly? Can you imagine anything worse than providing the worst with moral justification for their most bitter and vicious acts of hatred? And even the Jewish intellectuals who so foolishly waved the progressive banner, claiming undying kinship with the resentful and “victimized” now are beginning to see the deadly error of their ways.

The Jews are successful—in the Middle East, and elsewhere. There is no true merit for the progressives, however, to say it again—only claims to merit. There is no true innovation; no  sacrificial productivity and generosity—only theft from the victimized. Thus, according to the dictates of the post-modern Meta-Marxist, the successful Jews must be disproportionately avaricious, exploitative, and criminal, as that is the only allowable explanation. This turns out to be a very convenient theory for the Iranian leader-thugs, hoping to turn the attention away from their own failings, as it has been forever for such faux-leaders and true exploiters. It has always been useful to treat the Jews with disgust and contempt when it is time to find someone else to blame—and that is a strategy that forever appeals to the worst in everyone, and in every society. 

And you might remember this: once the psychopaths can turn their sights on the Jews, with no resistance or consequence, anyone who has anything is next. An

The danger of the victim/victimizer narrative cannot possibly be overstated. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the absolute catastrophe of Rwanda. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the victimizer, deserving of death. The spirit of Cain, whose second-rate sacrifices are eternally found lacking, all-too-easily becomes  Luciferian in its presumption, judging man and God alike for its failure, finding existence itself to be wanting, insisting that nothing but power truly rules. We fall continually for the blandishments of that spirit, which appeal to what is truly most appalling inside the darkest reaches of our psyches—and it is often the most “intelligent” among us (and therefore those most prey to the pride of the intellect) that are most dreadfully attracted. We invite it in to possess us at our extreme peril, nonetheless.

There are hundreds of thousands marching for the demonization of the Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the principalities of evil ideology and the actions of the world’s worst Machievellian autocrats. This has happened time and time again. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow to rule or even to move unimpeded among us those driven to vengeful madness by their envy, we are truly laying our necks on the line. We will pay, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins. 

Enough stupidity and blindness, Western cowards; Western good-thinkers. The barbarians are no longer at the gate: they are inside, and they are beginning to torture the Jews. They are not simply “the immigrants,” of whatever stripe, although those still adhering for their own miserable reasons to the most authoritarian of fundamentalist doctrines are certainly contributing. They would have little purchase, however, if the ground for their protestations had not already been prepared by the miserable, prideful “intellectual” ideologues purporting, not least, to educate our children, who are instead fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, and contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression. Their bloody doctrine, disguised as compassion, must be identified, understood and rejected, before nothing remains but the blood. 

 

Pro-Hamas Protests: Victims, Victimizers and Sanctimonious Psychopaths

We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread pro-Palestine demonstrates across the West (pro-Hamas, more truly)—particularly, although not only, in the London which is now the home of so many new immigrants. This has led to much predictable hand-wringing on the part of those who have been warning against the widespread remaking of the culture that is bound to accompany such widespread transformation of race, ethnicity and religion. Troublesome though too-rapid immigration and and oh-so-pristinely motivated policy that enables it may well be, it is by no means the main issue at hand. 

There are many reasons why the Palestinian cause—and, therefore, the cause of Hamas—has attracted so much support. Some of it has to do with the careless naivete and sheer blind heedlessness of the West. We like to believe that differences in mere metaphysical and religious outlook can be easily overlooked, in favor of the shared humanity in which the promoters of the multi-culturalism doctrine do not even believe. In consequence, we fail to take seriously the very real differences between people (especially at their worst) that cause the eternal conflicts and predatory and parasitical criminal activity that keep much of the world poor, miserable and mean. We think we can wave the magic wand of goodwill, and all such variance in opinion and outlook will just vanish at the borders, leaving nothing behind but the much-vaunted “diversity” whose pursuit has become an absolute moral imperative—or else. 

We also foolishly underestimate the persistence, strength and cunning of those who regard our virtues and freedoms as vices and historical accidents. Some reports have Hamas leaders or former leaders literally taking up residence in London—and certainly otherwise operating with little true constraint. Regardless of the truth of the specific claims, or the clear and present danger of those leaders, there can be little doubt that the serpentine authoritarian operatives of our enemies are now causing as much disruption as they possibly can everywhere in the major cities of the democratic world. The most germane current example is, obviously, that of the tyrants of Iran. Are we genuinely too stupid to note who, as well as what, is truly behind these massive demonstrations? 

It is the Iranian pseudo-religious thugs who are taking full advantage of the current conflict in Israel, which they did everything possible to bring about and promote. It has long been to the advantage to the totalitarians who wish to cling pathetically to their power in the Middle East and elsewhere to use the Palestinians as cannon-fodder and goads in the side of the Jewish state upon whom everything bad in the area and throughout time can so conveniently be blamed, as well as the United States, which has been such a reliable Israel supporter. 

We need to remember, although we won’t: the Iranian mullahs are on the ropes. Their own citizens hate them with a vengeance, and deservedly so. They are in addition thoroughly threatened by the Abraham Accords, which they are doing everything in their power to discredit and destroy. These historic agreements, long deemed impossible by an entrenched and intransigent State Department bureaucracy, brought peace and the possibility of cooperative prosperity to certain far-reaching Arab/Muslim countries (the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan). The much more powerful Saudis were supporting these initiatives, behind the scenes: we missed (that’s you, President Biden) a stellar and historically-unprecedented opportunity to bring them into the pro-Israel fold, mostly because of Democrat unwillingness to credit the Trump administration with any positive achievements whatsoever. C’est la vie—but here we are. All this laudaboe progress out of the 12th century risks fatally undermining the Muslims-against-everyone-most-particularly-the-Jews narrative that the bloody psychopaths inevitably depend upon to motivate the worst of themselves and their followers. Thus, it is in the clear interest of the Iran “leadership” to put the Jews in Israel on the offensive, so that use of their military and strategic prowess and ability in self-defense can be spun as—as what? That brings us precisely to the central problem.

Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matters, with the January 6th protests, and, most recently and seriously, with the massive and aforementioned pro-Palestine protests wracking our major cities. Disturbing as that dark cloud may well be, it has the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of that culture war, which has come as a shock to many including the liberal Jews recently called out, albeit somewhat awkwardly, by Elon Musk. How could it possibly be that so much of Western Academia (as well as the progressives, more generally), could come out in support of the very movement that caused what was arguably the worst planned attack on Jewry since the Holocaust? 

To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between post-modern philosophy and Marxism. We’ll concentrate most particularly on Michel Foucault, who is currently the world’s most-cited academic, and his joker Jacques Derrida. Foucault, the very embodiment of resentful bitterness (not least because of the alienation he suffered because of his sexual proclivities) spent his whole life bending his supreme intellect into knots reducing  all human motivation to that of power and its associated “repression.” 

For Foucault and his idiot quasi-Nietzschean followers, there is no reality other than that of  compulsion and force: no responsibility, no rights, no truth, no heaven above nor hell below—nothing but the all-against-all of Thomas Hobbes. For Foucault and his ilk even those claiming to be motivated by, say, the intellectual tradition, the liberal ethos, or even the much-vaunted current Goddess of All-Encompassing Compassion Herself are in truth pursuing nothing but their own narrowly self-centred aims. Although the post-modernists famously evinced a radical skepticism regarding the validity of so-called meta-narratives or single uniting stories, they were not at all loathe to adopt this much broader version of the arrogant, resentful Marxist victim/victimizer narrative that was particularly attractive to so many major French intellectuals of the time. 

History, for Marx, was best understood as the eternal battle between the corrupt haves and the innocent, virtuous and oppressed have-nots, the now-cliched bourgeoisie and proletariat. The world, for Marx, was in consequence pure conflict: his two classes of inevitable enemies faced off against each other for control of the purely economic spoils that made up all the true and real concern of true and genuine human beings (once all the religious and metaphysical “opiate of the masses” had been properly and progressively stripped away). This has morphed, under the pressure of the post-modern deconstructive ethos, into the meta-Marxism that likewise proclaims two classes of humanity, in even starker form: the victims (those that have anything and everything) and victimizers (those from whom the victimizers have stolen). This dichotomy is no longer merely economic: it characterizes every conceivable dimension of categorization, sexual, gendered (so-called), ethnic, racial, athletic, aesthetic and meritorious. Everywhere there is power dynamics, and subsequent inequality: everywhere there are evil victimizers and virtuous victims. This is the standard doctrine of the “elite” universities—faculty, students and administrators oppose it at their great peril. From those sources, it has spilled everywhere. 

In this landscape of existential—and, eventually and inevitably, real and active terror—there are no sovereign citizens of ineffable essential worth, exchanging rational opinions in the attempt to bring clarity, productivity, generosity and truth to the fore, capable of civilized cooperation and competition. There are merely competitors in an irreducibly ideological landscape, clamoring for attention and fighting for power—with the worst of those developing and employing even the veritable language of freedom, rights, responsibility and human dignity for no other even hypothetically possible reason than their own narrow self-aggrandization. There is no property: only theft. There is no merit: only the definitions of merit that serve the powerful victimizers. There is no intrinsically-meaningful human struggle: there is only the brief dominance-motivated battles of mortal material beings, struggling in pointless quasi-Darwinian competition, getting ahead only by trampling on the arbitrarily less fortunate others. A more comprehensively destructive, nihilistic and inevitably sadistic doctrine has never been imagined; neither has a system of thought ever so clearly and unapologetically justified the use of naught but force and compulsion. If there is nothing except power, only a fool fails to use it. 

In this nightmarish world (most truly that whose immediate precursors brought about the utter horrors of Mao and Stalin) there are only two social positions to occupy: you (and your group—there are no “individuals” in this conceptual scheme) are either victims or victimizers. This is a very simple theory. It is therefore something irresistibly attractive to the wilfully blind, stupid and ignorant, and also very convenient, to the bitter and resentful: if you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimizer. If you are not, you are a victim. A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white categorization: there are only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are goodness incarnate—as is supposed to be self-evident, not least because of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, a predatory parasite, and rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment (this becomes a veritable moral command). 

Here’s a codicil, or consequence, of that demented and dangerous “theory.” This all means that victimizers can be identified by nothing more than their “success.” Remember: there is no merit, only competing claims to ability, in a competitive zero-sum landscape. There is no property or ownership—only the dominance over material goods exerted by the oppressors. Thus, those who have—those who have anything, mind you, that anyone else does not have—are therefore oppressors, at least along that dimension of evaluation. This is true of any form of success whatsoever, in any guise, by any all possible standards. Thus attractiveness, intelligence, youth, age, wealth, education, social standing and much more (race, ethnicity, religious belief) become dimensions of exploitation and nothing more. The fact that this makes literally who has any more than absolutely nothing an victimizer is always glossed over, until the mob shows up—as it has. 

If you are a victimizer, remember, you have no moral standing whatsoever, and no punishment is either undeserved or too severe. This becomes true even if you are “only” a member of a victimizing group, and have done nothing wrong, other than that, as “individual” is a category that within the post-modern philosophy no longer truly exists. If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable—even morally required—even if you are merely a self-aggrandizing and vindictive “ally” of some marginalized group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door for worst possible actions of the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern left—most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the blackest of all possible resentful fantasies. 

What does this mean for Israel, re Hamas, Gaza and Palestine? Well, the Jews are successful. This is the source of their continual downfall. Good, properly-behaving minorities languish, performing poorly in silence. The Jews, with their social hyper-valuing of intellectual accomplishment and success, continually and irrepressibly outperform. Does this make them admirable? Not to the eternally resentful, to whom any sign of success is precisely the sign of the victimizer. Not to those who would rather assume that such success must be a consequence of the behind-the-scenes conspiracy that the Jews are always accused of fomenting, rather than a result of genuine ability and effort. Those don’t exist, remember?—not in the postmodern Meta-Marxist world.

And don’t we remember that the Jews were pilloried precisely as parasites by the National Socialists, planning to annihilate them, precisely because their success, economically and even in integrating, was nothing but proof of their theft and canniness? Doesn’t that hypothesis fit in all-too-perfectly with the radical leftist idea that success, per se, is nothing but than the consequence of the unjust compulsion and force that also characterizes “capitalism”? Isn’t it just ever so stunningly convenient—and dangerous—that such a proposition dovetails with the story of resentful, entitled narcissistic failures everywhere, looking to justify their own pathetic and often self-imposed misery, seeking desperately for a target for their consequent spite and hatred? And just how wonderful is it that the victim/victimizer narrative morally justifies the destruction of those whose success rankles so bitterly? Can you imagine anything worse than providing the worst with moral justification for their most bitter and vicious acts of hatred? And even the Jewish intellectuals who so foolishly waved the progressive banner, claiming undying kinship with the resentful and “victimized” now are beginning to see the deadly error of their ways.

The Jews are successful—in the Middle East, and elsewhere. There is no true merit for the progressives, however, to say it again—only claims to merit. There is no true innovation; no  sacrificial productivity and generosity—only theft from the victimized. Thus, according to the dictates of the post-modern Meta-Marxist, the successful Jews must be disproportionately avaricious, exploitative, and criminal, as that is the only allowable explanation. This turns out to be a very convenient theory for the Iranian leader-thugs, hoping to turn the attention away from their own failings, as it has been forever for such faux-leaders and true exploiters. It has always been useful to treat the Jews with disgust and contempt when it is time to find someone else to blame—and that is a strategy that forever appeals to the worst in everyone, and in every society. 

And you might remember this: once the psychopaths can turn their sights on the Jews, with no resistance or consequence, anyone who has anything is next. An

The danger of the victim/victimizer narrative cannot possibly be overstated. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the absolute catastrophe of Rwanda. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the victimizer, deserving of death. The spirit of Cain, whose second-rate sacrifices are eternally found lacking, all-too-easily becomes  Luciferian in its presumption, judging man and God alike for its failure, finding existence itself to be wanting, insisting that nothing but power truly rules. We fall continually for the blandishments of that spirit, which appeal to what is truly most appalling inside the darkest reaches of our psyches—and it is often the most “intelligent” among us (and therefore those most prey to the pride of the intellect) that are most dreadfully attracted. We invite it in to possess us at our extreme peril, nonetheless.

There are hundreds of thousands marching for the demonization of the Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the principalities of evil ideology and the actions of the world’s worst Machievellian autocrats. This has happened time and time again. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow to rule or even to move unimpeded among us those driven to vengeful madness by their envy, we are truly laying our necks on the line. We will pay, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins. 

Enough stupidity and blindness, Western cowards; Western good-thinkers. The barbarians are no longer at the gate: they are inside, and they are beginning to torture the Jews. They are not simply “the immigrants,” of whatever stripe, although those still adhering for their own miserable reasons to the most authoritarian of fundamentalist doctrines are certainly contributing. They would have little purchase, however, if the ground for their protestations had not already been prepared by the miserable, prideful “intellectual” ideologues purporting, not least, to educate our children, who are instead fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, and contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression. Their bloody doctrine, disguised as compassion, must be identified, understood and rejected, before nothing remains but the blood. 

The Jews Today and You Tomorrow

The rot in the Western world that has accrued in the last few years, revealed with particular clarity since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, showed its depth in a heretofore unparalleled manner this week in Washington, D.C. The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania appeared at a congressional hearing to face questions about the rise of anti-semitism on their respective campuses (a phenomenon duplicating itself across the academic landscape).

I watched the event unfold with the same sense of surreal disbelief that has surrounded me more and more frequently over the last decade, as the academic world and the broader culture it shapes have succumbed ever more completely to the faux-compassionate blandishments of the radical left.

We’ll give the devil his due, first, as is always appropriate. The three personages in question were most definitely subjected to intensely unfriendly questioning, particularly by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). They were put on the hot seat, while their politico interlocutor performed for the camera, and they reacted more defensively, angrily, resentfully and counterproductively than they might have otherwise. However, the same Congresswoman was for all her partisanship rather dreadfully effective in exposing the depth of narcissistic, moralizing, malevolent stupidity that passes for thought in our apparently-doomed institutions of higher education.

I make that latter comment with no pleasure whatsoever: the six years I taught in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the pre-eminent Ivy League campus in the United States served as a pinnacle point of my early career. Harvard truly lived up to its reputation in the early ’90s. The senior faculty serving there were the most educated and able people I had ever met; their junior counterparts truly the hottest young researchers and teachers in the world; the undergraduates reliably the smartest, hardest-working and generally admirable young men and women imaginable. The great university did its job, and it did it well.

Those days are long gone. Even the last competent president of the once-stellar university, Lawrence Summers, recently and publicly admitted as much. Now, led by the woefully unqualified Claudine Gay, Harvard was recently awarded a score below zero for freedom of speech on campus by FIRE, an organization that would have been recognized as quite liberal at any point in the past, excepting the last four or five years. MIT is faring no better. I spoke at length with two of their prominent professors in the last month. Both have bailed out in disgust from what was once and rightly so the engineering centrepiece of the entire world. The administration there no longer recognizes merit, they told me. It fails to support its faculty, no longer prioritizing the innovation, excellence, and sheer brilliant eccentricity once fostered and celebrated, above all, precisely there. As goes Harvard and MIT, so goes U Penn, also a once-admirable and excellent school. There are virtually no exceptions in the realm of higher education to this rule of corruption and failure.

I watched the demise of the University in Toronto, over the twenty years I spent there as a professor. Every bloody time the ever-expanding administration put counterproductive pressure on the faculty (hiring more Deans, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans and Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity commissars) the spineless academics folded. I grew tired of objecting, one painful faculty meeting after another: “Why are we allowing them to increase class size; place more restrictive rules on our research protocols; implement yet another delusional and false five-year plan; eliminate all year-long courses; subject us to constant ideological training, conducted by self-evidently unqualified frauds; etc., etc? We could just say ‘no’! What could they possibly do?” The answer I received was always the same: “Then they won’t give us what we want.” My objection — “They don’t give us what we want now” — was continually met by the collective shrug of shoulders that over two decades handed the entire enterprise over to the encroaching bureaucrats.

And that was by no means the end of it: first, the administration took over the universities, massively increasing costs and decreasing efficiency. Then the parasitical and predatory woke mob took over the administration. It took decades for the first catastrophe to unfold, and mere years for the second. And here we are — and where that is, precisely, was what made itself known in D.C.

Rep. Stefanik pushed the three university presidents hard, each in turn, requesting at least by implication an affirmative response to “the easiest question to answer”: “Does calling specifically for the genocide of Jews violate (your university’s) code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment?” To understand what happened next, in all three cases, it is necessary to understand that these selfsame codes and rules have been a veritable shibboleth of the moralizing activists the three presidents concerned so directly condone, support and produce. For years, a continuous clamour has arisen from the snowflakes, allies, Marxists, post-modernists and generally psychopathological neurotics concerning the absolute danger of speech that could in any way imaginable cause offence to anyone imaginable under any circumstances whatsoever.

But now, suddenly, this insistence — one that has already destroyed the careers and even the lives of far more than a few — appears to be fully disposable, as long as the speech in question is calling directly and viciously for the genocide of Jews. First to prevaricate was MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth. Demented smile plastered firmly on animus-possessed face, this dangerous excuse for a human being claimed, for example, that the increasingly strident campus-protester calls for intefadeh (a word derived from the Arabic to “shake off”—as in “dirt from one’s sandals”) had to be interpreted “in context.” I presume that the same applies to “from the river to the sea.”

Despite the stunned disbelief this demented utterance immediately produced on the part of the questioner — and the audience — the next two president-marionettes mouthed the same propagandistic and apparently-rehearsed lines: Liz Magill of U Penn indicated that calls for Jewish genocide were only “bullying and harassment” if “directed, severe and pervasive” — the diagnosis of which was a “context-dependent decision.” Then, even more unbelievably — and after being warned that her answer would resound around the world — Magill said that such speech would become harassment only “when it became conduct.” This dumbfounding response would have stopped a lesser questioner in her tracks, but Stefanik remained on course, immediately pointing out that such “conduct” meant “actually committing genocide.” Have we ever witnessed such things in our lifetime?

Harvard’s supercilious Gay fared no better. The question was repeated: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” Gay allowed the devil himself to speak through her: “It can be — depending on the context.” Now, it would be one thing if Harvard was the absolutely staunch libertarian defender of free speech that Gay was implicitly claiming (the only stance that could possibly justify such a response) but her institution’s bottom-of-the-barrel aforementioned recent score on that front rules out such a possibility.

The true situation is in fact quite clear: there is one set of rules, say, for saying something mildly sexually inappropriate at a drunken party if you’re a callow frat boy and another if you’re a raving mad postmodern meta-Marxist hellbent on the destruction of the Jews. Gay was, nonetheless and quite mercifully, granted another kick at the proverbial cat. Rep. Stefanik, who was to say the least both shocked and irritated by Gay’s first answer encouraged her in a follow-up to state clearly the “yes” that would have let the Harvard ruler off the hook. She doubled down, instead, as all would-be tyrants do, repeating her all-explaining-and-excusing cliché: “it depends on the context.”

How did we get to such a point? There is a terribly simple answer to that question, unfortunately — terribly simple in the manner that appeals to the simplest and most terrible of minds. The universities and the idiot, cowardly and delusional academics, administrators and students who inhabit them have gone over, en masse, to the land of the postmodern nihilists and their pathological meta-Marxism. “There is and can be no uniting narrative,” the so-called philosophers howl, while simultaneously elevating the worst of all possible doctrines of resentment to precisely that status.

It was good ole’ Karl who split the world into two camps: that of the proletariat, virtuous by the mere fact of their subjugation, and that of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist owners, upon whose heads were heaped all the coals of fire necessary to burn their profiteering, thieving houses and hides to the ground, along with the lives and property of their families. Victims and victimizers: that’s the world, and all you need to know to master it. History, family, friendship, all possible social and economic relationships (the latter deemed fundamental by the bloody communists): all can be understood, and immediately, in terms of the dynamic of oppressed and oppressor, the ultimate of classes and categories.

The fact that accepting such a description and interpretation inevitably brought about famine, terror and genocidal murder revealed itself with such a vengeance in the aftermath of Stalin and Mao in the 1960s and ’70s that even the most public of French intellectuals, bitter leftist anti-capitalists to the core, found themselves required to transmute their doctrine, Forthwith, they abandoned the economic argument — but not the underlying narrative of parasite and host. That they instead expanded, far beyond even the imagination of the German spawn of Cain who formulated the vicious and deadly communist thesis in the first place. Oppressed and oppressor could be found everywhere, not only in the economic realm. Nothing but power exists and rules: this according to no less an authority than the damnable Michel Foucault (presently the  world’s most cited academic (!)). Race, religion, ethnicity, sex, “gender,” intelligence, physical ability, attractiveness, education, wealth, ownership, talent — everything can and must be viewed through the lens of power.

Pick a dimension of evaluation. Identify the “oppressor” (anyone successful; anyone with anything not owned or characterizing by everyone else). Claim “allyship” with the oppressed. Voila! You now understand everything, and have done all the work necessary to establish your reputation. It’s a universal explanation, compressed into a single idea — and more: a one-claim pathway to the highest strata of unearned moral virtue. That’s a deal too attractive to resist, allowing those who accept it to bask in their stupidity, glory in their hypocrisy and torture those they envy in good conscience.

The fact that such a theory allows the accusation of exploitation to be levied against everyone (as we all have something lacked by someone else somewhere or at some time), and that there is tremendous danger in that, can be all-too-conveniently ignored — until the mob shows up at the once-accuser’s door, pitchfork and torch in hand. On second thought: Perhaps that’s a feature, instead of a bug. The payoff for the dreadful simplification is just too high: all work necessary to understand the complexities of human psychological, economic and social function is no longer necessary (as a full explanation has been provided); furthermore, the goodness so long sought by serious contemplatives, mystics and saints exists right at hand. Mere stated pity for the oppressed makes you the best of all possible persons. And if that means to hell with everyone else, so be it — even if that hell will envelop future you at some point in the now-thankfully-distant forthcoming years.

Let me make this perfectly clear: the victim/victimizer narrative presents everything in the world of facts as the consequence of use and misuse of power — and that is power as ability and willingness to employ force, compel and exploit. It adds to this the reduction of morality to nothing more than reflexive pity for the oppressed, no matter how unthinking, wilfully-blind, self-serving or outright false. Acceptance of this appalling theory means that all the problems of the entire world of fact and the entire world of value have been solved, permanently, in one stroke (or else). Nothing could be easier to understand, or more attractive, to the immature and  ignorant, to say nothing of the wilfully-blind and malevolent. How convenient. How self-serving—and, ultimately, how destructive and deadly. And we know that it is the blind, naïve and intellectually inept as well as the outright psychopathic who are most prone to possession by such ideas.

What does all this have to do with the universities, their presidents, and the Jews? Well, the latter have the great misfortune of being successful. In a world where the possession of anything of discriminating merit defines the oppressor — and, therefore, the Evil One — the Jews always have too much. This makes them the victimizers, just as they always have been to the eternal antisemites; just as they were, most infamously, to the Nazis. The Palestinians have for some reason and very fortunately for them been deemed the loser-winners of the most intense current victim/victimizer contest (the only tournament currently deemed acceptable). Thus, they’re good, all historical complexity and evidence to the contrary be damned — as are those who stand heroically beside them, no matter how counterproductively. The flipside of this decision is, of course, that the Jews must be evil, an outcome which has the enviable side-benefit of allowing them to be hated with good conscience, by exactly those who constantly proclaim undying solidarity with the underdogs.

I observed the spectacle of the university presidents with true dread. It was not only that they unthinkably, self-righteously and dangerously promulgated the most dangerous of claims: that power rules everything — the very claim that justifies the use of power; the very claim that is put forward for precisely that purpose; the very claim that when sufficiently widespread (as it was in the U.S.S.R and still is in China and North Korea) turns everything and very rapidly to deep and endless misery. It was that they did so without even noticing or reflecting upon the fact that they were doing; without thinking at all about what they were doing meant.

Let’s make it stark and clear: The presidents of three of the most influential universities in the world this week justified the utterance on their respective campuses of genocidal threats against the Jews. They did so while claiming the moral high ground — and as if that claim was undeniable, in keeping with the axioms of their pathological doctrine. They did so, furthermore, while purporting to support the free speech they most truly hold in contempt (as part of the superceded oppressive patriarchal morality of the liberal West). They did so even though there is nothing worse than a Nazi, in hypothetical principle, to a moralizing leftist: so much so that everyone and anyone can be therefore conveniently tarred with that brush, at the drop of a hat. I have had more than my fair share of experience with such delights, despite lecturing about the dangers of National Socialism for more than three decades at Harvard itself, as well as the University of Toronto.

The fact that plunging snout-deep into the postmodern meta-Marxist academic trough will actually turn you, if not into a full-fledged Nazi, at least into someone who will testify in front of Congress on behalf of those promoting the deadliest of hatreds toward the Jews — shouldn’t that have given those presidents pause? And the fact that it didn’t, while they simultaneously refused to notice the fact of their own possession, showing no shame whatsoever for it, failing even to be concerned with the potential effect on their own reputation — shouldn’t that give all of us watching pause? Is the bubble they inhabit truly that thick? And the answer is likely “yes.” Worse yet, it is that pervasive, in the general culture: I don’t believe for a minute that these women will pay for their sin with their jobs, even though they should clearly be fired, given that they don’t have enough sense to resign in well-deserved disgrace.

And I should point out in closing that the same bloody dread doctrine that poured itself out of the mouths of those pathetic excuses for intellectual leaders and thinkers in D.C. also fully possesses the leadership of our current government here in Canada, our own institutes of higher education and, increasingly, all the minds of the educated class. Luciferian presumption rules everywhere — and the pride we now celebrate (or else) for a month if not a season inevitably goes before a fall.

I have seldom seen such a sickening sight. I’m embarrassed in its aftermath to have even been associated with an enterprise that could go so spectacularly and perilously wrong. I’ve done my level best for many years to warn everyone I could of what was happening on campus, in class, and behind the closed doors of the universities. We’re also trying to do something about it, concretely, with the forthcoming launch of Peterson Academy, which already has a mailing list of some 200,000. Now you can see the rot for yourself, if you have the eyes to see.

We will look back on what we are doing with great shame. The Jews today, blind fools: You and those you love tomorrow. So it has been since the dawn of history.

Fox, Newsom and DeSantis: More smoke than fire

The Revealing Debate Between DeSantis and Newsom

What was on display on Thursday night, December 1, during the debate between Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis and Governor Gavin Newsom of California was revelatory, but not in the manner intended by the hosting network, Fox, or either of the participants.

What it revealed, instead of the ideas of the participants, was the absolutely dangerous inadequacy and self-serving mendacity of the legacy broadcast-and-cable TV networks.

What it revealed, as well, was the continuing naivete and poorly formulated vision and strategy of both DeSantis and Newsom—and, more generally, of the political system and its leaders as currently instantiated on the Republican and Democrat side alike.

The Inadequacy and Mendacity of Legacy Network TV

Why the inadequacy and mendacity of legacy network TV? Consider the debate, as event (independent of content).

First, it was Fox News and Sean Hannity who served as distal and proximal hosts, respectively, of the event. This was a strange choice, for many reasons. The first is systemic: the days of the legacy TV news channel have seriously ended, but that fact has not yet thoroughly permeated the dinosaur-consciousness of the political system, or its actors, even in the US, where the death of that past is most marked and evident.

The Fox News “debate” was also by no means a debate, nor even a discussion: it was a low form of entertainment, masquerading as a serious political event. The questions were not real questions, and the answers were, in consequence, equally meaningless. I mean this in the deepest of all possible sense: the whole event was a stage show, designed to maximize conflict, and attract “viewers,” in the same way that click-bait manages that, however temporarily and destructively, in the increasingly delusional online world.

The faux-enthusiastic voice of a boxing match promoter would not have been out of place at the very beginning of the show: mega-voiced Michael Buffer, for example, monster-truck-rallying the avid and blood-thirsty viewers: “let’s get r-r-r-ready to rumble!”

Partisan Choices and the Dynamics of the Debate

The second strangeness of choice was partisan: Hannity is clearly a conservative, on a network devoted to Republicans, and that set up Newsom in the admirable and advantageous position of underdog. I was by no means rooting for his success, but I could not help appreciating the fact that he put himself under fire, in enemy territory, and there was absolutely no reason to cede him that major advantage.

Most of the questions Hannity and Fox posed were self-evidently Republican-oriented porcupine-quills, designed to get under the skin of Newsom and to stay there. I say that as no admirer either of the Governor of California or his policies. It was arguably brave, nonetheless, of Newsom to even show up on Fox, and with Hannity, although I truly think that it was more truly the bravado of a dyed-in-the-wool showman than the genuine courage of someone acting, genuinely, on his convictions.

This is in keeping with the “amusing ourselves to death” ethos of the broadcast TV networks, where production value, flash and a pseudo-professional appearance absolutely and finally take preference over the package product that such “content providers” deliver, painfully, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, and second-by-second. Hannity never asked a single true question: that is, a question that he had some reason for wanting to have answered. What he received in response were precisely the false answers that such staged inquiries inevitably produce.

There was no actual curiosity on display, anywhere, of the sort that would allow the viewers to understand more deeply what motivated the two main players, or what they were putting forward for a plan.

And, with regard to plan: that was perhaps the most disappointing element of the discussion.

This is relevant to my second major criticism: the naivete and poorly formulated vision of the participants.

The Bulk Of The Back-And-Forth Comprised An Exchange Of Criticisms

The bulk of the back-and-forth comprised an exchange of criticisms. DeSantis leapt out of the gate with a blistering attack on his Democrat compatriot, producing a litany of complaints about the increasingly dismal state of the most beautiful, prosperous and arguably most influential member of the union.

Was that attack warranted? Well, Californians are leaving in droves, and it is always the people with the most options and abilities who leave first.

DeSantis noted quite properly that at one point in the recent past the Golden State exodus had become so rapid that fleeing once-denizens of the state were having difficulty renting one of the ubiquitous U-hauls that modern migrants use to move their belongings when on a budget and in a hurry.

“Warranted or not,” however, is not the point. Mutual whack-a-mole is not a good game. Nor does it present itself as such. It adds immeasurably to the stress of political life, and produces little but cynicism on the part of the viewers and listeners.

DeSantis accused Newsom of the slipperiness for which politicians and others in the public eye are often truly characterized—and rightly so—but a political player cannot do so without simultaneously casting aspersions on his own character.

If those in the political realm are slick and evasive, and that is also your place of chosen profession, the simplest conclusion that can drawn about you by those in your audience is by no means advantageous to you.

“I’m the exception to the political rule” is a claim that begs a number of questions: “Why, then, are you in the game? Why should we believe your assertions of moral authority, and not those of your opponent, who is also playing that very game?”—and, finally, “If even someone in the game is cynical about the players, why shouldn’t we as citizens be dismissive of the whole enterprise?” That latter query is an increasingly widespread attitude of great danger. It has become more and more difficult, for example, for me to attract views on my podcast for anyone of any political stripe whatsoever, regardless of their political opinions or performance as a guest, with a few cardinal exceptions. People’s attention is certainly much more attracted elsewhere.

The Need for a Visionary and Constructive Political Dialogue

“We’re less stupid and destructive than our opponents” is a claim almost certainly true on the conservative side, given the terrible slide into left-wing radicalism that increasingly characterizes the Democrats, but it is hardly an inspiring vision.

It is also the case that the typical decent conservative is simply outmatched when it comes to character assassination and mud-slinging: the left has elevated reputation-savaging and destruction to an art, and if I had to place a bet on who was better at it, by character and practice, I would bet on California’s all-too-smiley, shiny, slick and popular Newsom rather than the earnest-to-the-point-of-easy-satire DeSantis, although he is clearly better (and multidimensionally) as a man. But where in all this is the shining city on the hill?

Here are some real questions, that serious, thoughtful people might perhaps really want to have answered: By what principles do you govern? Why those principles, rather than the many others available? How do your principles differ, in your opinion, from those of your opponent? Would he agree or disagree with that characterization? What is your vision, generally, for the future that your leadership would bring about? And, more specifically, with regard to the important dimensions of human life: employment, entrepreneurship, education, energy, environment, family; with regard to civic responsibility, opportunity and duty?

The Need for a More Mature and Insightful Political Discourse

The Fox hosting was either incompetent, or designed precisely to produce the “fiery debate” (which was almost all smoke, rather than true flames) that the debate was immediately said to constitute in the aftermath mop-up. I suspect a little of column “A” and a little of column “B.” And that post-hoc analysis was also purely performative and formulaic, featuring as it did the same predictable commentators, looking both half-dead and pithed as they always do, in consequence of being unable to see or even truly hear their questioner or their fellow participants through the archaic 20th-century-tech single earbuds and faceless one-way camera the networks still inexplicably insist upon employing.

The discussion could have been mediated to maximize reasonable and informative exchange, rather than designed or allowed to spark and encourage a destructive fire.

This would have not been difficult. An agreed-upon list of (real) questions; some space for a genuine interviewer to interpose something spontaneous; and the imposition of some actual equally-agreed-upon rules of engagement: three minutes for a response, say, from each participant, with another minute or two for rebuttal—that would perhaps have been sufficient.

It at least seemed that half the time, instead, Newsom and DeSantis were talking over one another, with Hannity’s voice frequently added to the fray. All that did was present a juvenile front.

Some of that is on the candidates, for being either foolish, naïve or combative enough to allow it to happen—and to fail to notice and regulate it once begun—but most of it can be laid at the feet of Fox, who inexcusably presented little more than a high-school popularity contest between Mr. Charm-and-Toothy-Smile, gracing us with his presence, and The Earnest and Well-Meaning Jock, all competence and indignation. It is really the case that the next leader of the free world should be chosen, even in part, because he has the capacity to resist being talked over rudely?

We Need To Grow Up, And Quick.

We need to grow up, and quick. The tectonic plates are moving underneath us, at a rate heretofore unprecedented, and the shocks and after-shocks will be both continuous and great.

We can no longer afford (and probably never could) to allow the shallow corporate press to parasitize the political process for the sake of the ratings that are in any case falling ever-further and permanently out of reach. We’re embroiled in at least two wars. Our societies are rife with internal conflict.

We have great possibility and great danger in front of us, and we better negotiate that territory carefully, or there will be an unimaginable price to pay.

It would have been much better to have the discussion hosted by Joe Rogan, or Theo Von, or Lex Fridman—the popular podcast hosts derided by Newsom as leading “micro-cults” (a criticism that demonstrates nothing but how stuck in 1990’s or even 1970’s La-La land that “progressive leader” truly is).

Those hosts attract large audiences because they ask honest questions and promote true dialog, without any of the faux-entertainment hype that has characterized the political and ideational landscape since the widespread introduction of broadcast television.

Rogan manages to dominate the podcast landscape (making the charts in 65 countries) with at team that basically consists of himself and one assistant. Hype is not his aim. The same is true of the other new media interviewers with true global impact.

It would have been much better not only to have had the contestants asked genuine questions, by people actually curious about the answers, but to invite them to articulate and share their visions for the remarkable, free, productive, honest and generous country that the US most truly is and could even better be.

Did anyone learn what would be different under DeSantis or Newsom/Biden/Harris, with regard to the energy that keeps our lights on, the environment that we will leave our grand-children, the families we all inhabit, or the educational and health systems that cost us ever more and in many ways deliver ever less?

The audience was instead left in serious doubt even as to the reality of the matters in question.
Every “fact-based” criticism levied, for example, by Hannity and DeSantis on Newsom, was met by a “counter-fact” of equal gravitas by the recipient of the attack. I am much more likely to give credence to anything DeSantis says, compared to anything Newsom says, but that is not the point.

In this landscape of alternate facts, where any given description of the current state of things (even as fundamental as economic performance or criminal activity) is instantly met by an “equally factual” counter-claim, all that can be left is a competition between visions:? who presents the most inviting, compelling and plausible future?

Why Are We Not Talking About What Comes Next

Why are we not talking about what comes next, instead of casting aspersions at our hypothetical foes? These are, in the final analysis, people we must live beside and with (often within the confines of our own families). We can accomplish that with vision, not with accusation (no matter how justified and necessary such accusation sometimes is).

My opponents are best wrong, not because of the errors they are currently making, no matter how manifold, but because the possibilities they are offering are simply not as attractive as what I am dreaming up and planning.

I would love to see a true vision presented by the would-be leaders of the US, as the problems that beset the overwhelmingly-admirable-by-comparison Americans are characteristic of those plaguing us everywhere in the free and democratic world. We need to up our game, conservatives, liberals and progressives alike—and that is not what happened, on the Thursday night of the right-against-left smoke-and-mirror juvenile broadcast brawl.