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Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a widely cited scholar of personality, and the author of whats currently the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon in the United States. The New York Timess David Brooks, echoing George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, calls him the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.

Jordan Peterson is also a right-wing internet celebrity who has claimed that feminists have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination, referred to developing nations as pits of catastrophe in a speech to a Dutch far-right group, and recently told a Times reporter that he supported enforced monogamy.

When Cathy Newman, a journalist for the UKs Channel 4, challenged Petersons arguments in a televised interview, she received so many death threats that she had to get help from the police. There were literally thousands of abusive tweets it was a semi-organized campaign, she recalled in an interview. It ranged from the usual cunt, bitch, dumb blonde to Im going to find out where you live and execute you.

This is not a case of mistaken identity, of two Jordan Petersons yoked to the same name. These seemingly distinct men, the accomplished scholar and the controversy-courting culture warrior, are one and the same, and their work is integrally interlinked. And that hybrid of scholarly air and provocative trolling has netted Peterson a huge following; he has 560,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers.

Peterson introduces people [to] many many other things they just dont really get elsewhere, Cowen says. He is still influential, massively so, reaches a large general public audience of millions, most of all young males. How many other intellectuals do?

So how did an obscure Canadian psychologist become an international phenomenon?

The answer is that Jordan Peterson is tailor-made to our political moment. His reactionary politics and talents as a public speaker combine to be a perfect fit for YouTube and the right-wing media, where videos of conservatives destroying weak-minded liberals routinely go viral. Petersons denunciations of identity politics and political correctness are standard-issue conservative, but his academic credentials make his pronouncements feel much more authoritative than your replacement-level Fox News commentator. (I reached out to Peterson; a spokesperson turned down my interview request.)

Peterson is also particularly appealing to disaffected young men. Hes become a lifestyle guru for men and boys who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack; his new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, is explicitly pitched as a self-help manual, and he speaks emotionally of the impact his work has had on anxious, lost young men.

Jordan Peterson, then, isnt just some random professor who managed to strike it rich. Hes emblematic of the way white male anxiety is producing new and powerful political movements across the West today.

Peterson is both a clinical and research psychologist, meaning he sees patients while also doing research. After he received his PhD in psychology from McGill University, one of Canadas two most prestigious universities, in 1991, he spent two years practicing at McGills hospital. After that, he was hired by Harvard, where he taught until 1998. He left when the University of Toronto, Canadas other leading university, hired him as a full professor and a practicing clinician.

Petersons research specialty is personality traits; one of his most prominent papers is a study of what makes people more or less creative, where he argues that people who pay more attention to seemingly irrelevant details actually tend to be more creative. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited more than 10,000 times in academic publications and is one of the 70 most cited researchers in his subfield. I spoke to eight academic psychologists before writing this piece; the feedback I received on his published work was uniformly positive.

His work in personality assessment ... is very solid and well respected, says David Watson, a psychology professor at Notre Dame.

But this work, respected as it may be, has little to do with Petersons fame. His most influential research was published in the late 90s and early to mid-2000s; of his 20 most cited papers, only one came out after 2010. By contrast, his international celebrity as measured by worldwide Google searches for Jordan Peterson didnt start to rise until October 2016:

What happened in the fall of 2016 is that Peterson inserted himself into a national Canadian debate over transgender rights specifically by refusing to refer to a student by their chosen gender pronouns.

At the time, the Canadian parliament was considering something called Bill C-16, a bill banning discrimination against people on the basis of gender identity or gender expression. In September, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos attacking the bill as a grave threat to free speech rights. He said he would refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns; separating gender and biological sex was, in his view, radically politically correct thinking. He argued that C-16 would lead to people like him being arrested.

If they fine me, I wont pay it. If they put me in jail, Ill go on a hunger strike. Im not doing this, Peterson said in an October 2016 TV interview. Im not using the words that other people require me to use. Especially if theyre made up by radical left-wing ideologues.

Experts on Canadian law said that Peterson was misreading the bill that the legal standard for hate speech would require something far worse, like saying transgender people should be killed, to qualify for legal punishment. This is an early example of what would become a hallmark of Petersons approach as a public intellectual taking inflammatory, somewhat misinformed stances on issues of public concern outside his area of expertise.

But it worked for him. Petersons videos on C-16 and political correctness racked up more than 400,000 views on YouTube within about a month of posting. There were rallies both for and against Peterson in Toronto; he made the rounds on Canadian television.

Perhaps the defining moment of this controversy was a filmed confrontation in October 2016 between Peterson and a group of student activists at the University of Toronto. In it, Peterson calmly fields questions from trans students who are angry about his refusal to recognize their gender identity. In the video, he turns the argument around on them suggesting that transgender activism, and the broader rise of political correctness, was bound to produce an ugly and dangerous backlash.

Ive studied Nazism for four decades. And I understand it very well. And I can tell you there are some awful people lurking in the corners, Peterson says. Theyre ready to come out. And if the radical left keeps pushing the way its pushing, theyre going to come.

Fans of Petersons worldview saw the video as proof of his genius and bravery; Peterson was the avatar of reason and facts pushing back against irrational social justice warriors (SJWs). One cut of the confrontation, titled Dr. Jordan Peterson gives up trying to reason with SJWs, currently has more than 3.5 million views on YouTube.

This was a seminal moment in the Peterson brand. It was proof that taking combative stances on camera especially arguments where youre set up to win, like a calm professor confronted by angry students would get you huge numbers of fans. There are now innumerable videos of Peterson arguing with various liberals and leftists on YouTube, with titles like Leftist Host SNAPS At Jordan Peterson, Instantly Regrets It. They have millions of views and have led to a massive surge in donations to Petersons personal account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. He currently earns around $80,000 per month from Patreon donations.

I shouldnt say this, but Im going to, because its just so goddamn funny I cant help but say it: Ive figured out how to monetize social justice warriors, Peterson told the podcast host Joe Rogan. If they let me speak, then I get to speak, and then I make more money on Patreon ... if they protest me, then that goes up on YouTube, and my Patreon account goes WAY up.

Petersons stellar academic credentials act as a sort of legitimizing device, a way of setting up his authority on politics and making his denunciations of leftist ideologues more credible and attractive to his fans. Combine his undeniable talents as a public speaker and debater with his ability to use YouTube to reach audiences around the world and you get a right-wing celebrity who has transcended Canada and become a global reactionary star.

Petersons political ideas are most cleanly laid out in a two-and-a-half-hour lecture hes given, titled Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege. His upload of one of the speeches, at the University of British Columbia Free Speech Club, has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, with other copies and excerpts from it racking up similarly large numbers.

In the lecture, Peterson weaves together an incredibly broad set of topics ranging from Soviet history to the biblical story of Cain and Abel to Nietzsche to lab experiments that involve feeding rats cocaine to produce a kind of unified theory of modern politics. At base, he argues that that Soviet-style communism, and all the mass murder and suffering it created, is still a serious threat to Western civilization. But rather than working openly, it seeps into our politics under the guise of postmodernism.

Petersons argument starts with a vivid denunciation of Marxism. Human society, like all animal kingdoms, is in Petersons mind defined by certain biological truths including the reality that some people are naturally more gifted than others, and that life will always involve suffering. Marxism, he believes, is rooted fundamentally in the hatred of people who succeed in a capitalist economy and thus will always result in violence when one attempts to implement it.

Are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred? Well, is it love or hatred that produces 100 million dead people? he asks in the speech, rhetorically.

Peterson believes that the failure of Soviet communism has not actually deterred communisms fans in the West, who still secretly cling to the old hateful beliefs. He argues that they do so under the guise of a school of thought he refers to as postmodernism, which he sees as his archenemy.

Western leftist intellectuals are [fundamentally complicit] in the horrors of the 21st century, he says. Its not that theyve learned anything since; theyve just gone underground. And thats what I see when I see postmodernism.

Peterson uses the term postmodernism fairly loosely, but hes referring to, roughly speaking, French philosophers working in the middle of the 20th century, most prominently Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

He argues that these philosophers, famous for their skepticism about objective reality and emphasis on the social construction of human society, were actually crypto-Marxists. The difference is that they change the language instead of arguing that society is defined by class oppression, Peterson says, they argue that its defined by identity oppression: racism, sexism, gender identity, and the like.

How about if we dont say working-class capitalists we say oppressor/oppressed? he says, summarizing the alleged postmodern line of thinking. Well just think about all of the other ways people are oppressed, and all the other ways that people are oppressors, and well play the same damn game under a new guise.

This makes postmodernism, which he believes has quietly permeated Western culture in the past 20 or so years, a tremendous threat.

The Marxists arent just wrong: Theyre wrong, murderous, and genocidal, he says. The postmodernists dont just get to just come along an adopt Marxism as a matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didnt work out and they needed a rationalization, because its too dangerous its too dangerous to the rest of us.

Actual experts on postmodernism note that the thinkers Peterson likes to cite were often quite critical of Marxism. His reading of these thinkers, as the social critic Shuja Haider points out, is shallow and deeply uncharitable. Petersons fantasy of neo-Marxist wolves in postmodern sheeps clothing has little bearing on actual debates in 20th-century political theory, Haider concludes.

Petersons understanding of Marxism and postmodernism is very vulgar, Harrison Fluss, an editor at the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, tells me. He connects the two in [an] overarching conspiracy theory.

Perhaps more fundamentally, there is no evidence that 20th-century French thinkers have a dominant influence on any sector of the left in contemporary Western politics, let alone society as a whole. I know of no credible political scientist who believes this, and Petersons adherence to the notion can lead to bizarre outbursts. For example, he once accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of being in thrall to a murderous equity doctrine because Trudeau sent a tweet calling feminist activists inspiring and motivating.

But Petersons grand theory is brilliant as a political stance one designed to weaponize the grievances of the kind of young men attracted to the alt-right.

Petersons framework serves as a justification for dismissing the idea of any kind of privilege white, male, or otherwise as a tool used by closet Marxists to manipulate you. He states this explicitly, calling it a Marxist lie designed to enable the Marxist-postmodernist effort to seize control of the state.

[We cannot] allow people who are manipulating us with historical ignorance and philosophical sleight of hand to render us so goddamn guilty about what our ancestors may or may not have done, he argues, that we allow our shame and our guilt to be used as tools to manipulate us into accepting a future that we do not want to have.

This theory elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the postmodernists win, if people start using others chosen pronouns, were one step closer to modern gulags.

Petersons position helps claim the mantle of facts and reason for the anti-PC right. Because postmodern theorists are skeptical about the notion of an entirely objective reality, Peterson argues, the entire project of identity politics is grounded in an irrational rejection of logic and discussion. Its not only right to reject identity politics; its a sign of irrationality not to.

Postmodernists dont believe in fact, as he put it in the lecture on white privilege and Marxism. They believe that the idea of fact is part of the power game thats played by the white-dominated male patriarchy to impose the tyrannical structure of the patriarchy on the oppressors.

These arguments are catnip for a very specific kind of young white man Peterson himself said in his Channel 4 interview that 80 percent of his YouTube audience is male. These young men are upset about the erosion of white male privilege, about the need to compete with women and minorities for jobs and spots at top universities, and they are angry about the way feminists and racial justice activists describe society.

In Peterson, they found someone telling them that their grievances are not only justified but, in fact, important: that they have picked up on a secret threat to society writ large, and that they are its first victims. Peterson is drawing on a deep well: This kind of anger about the declining social status of white men is incredibly common across the Western world today, and finds a comfortable home in reactionary political movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

The underlying mass-appeal of [Peterson] is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other peoples grievances, writes Jesse Brown, host of the Canadaland podcast and a longtime Peterson watcher. He tells his fans that these so-called marginalized people are not really victims at all but are in fact aggressors, enemies, who must be shut down.

But Peterson isnt only giving these men an architecture in which to ground their frustrations. Hes also giving them a road map on how to succeed in a society they no longer understand.

Peterson became more than just an internet celebrity on January 23, 2018. Thats when his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published by Random House Canada and skyrocketed to the top of international best-seller lists. It was after this books publication, and the following press tour, that David Brooks pronounced him the worlds most influential public intellectual.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a specific, somewhat strange-sounding rule. The first chapter is called Stand up straight with your shoulders back; the last is Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

The book is a kind of bridge connecting his academic research on personality and his political punditry. In it, Peterson argues that the problem with society today is that too many people blame their lot in life on forces outside their control the patriarchy, for example. By taking responsibility for yourself, and following his rules, he says, you can make your own life better.

The first chapter, about posture, begins with an extended discussion of lobsters. Lobster society, inasmuch as it exists, is characterized by territoriality and displays of dominance. Lobsters that dominate these hierarchies have more authoritative body language; weaker ones try to make themselves look smaller and less threatening to more dominant ones.

Peterson argues that humans are very much like lobsters: Our hierarchies are determined by our behaviors. If you want to be happy and powerful, he says, you need to stand up straight:

If your posture is poor, for example if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind) then you will feel small, defeated, and ineffectual. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.

Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back, he concludes, in one of the books most popular passages.

The lobster has become a sort of symbol of his; the tens of thousands of Peterson fans on his dedicated subreddit even refer to themselves as lobsters.

This is classic Peterson: He loves to take stylized facts about the animal kingdom and draw a one-to-one analogy to human behavior. It also has political implications: He argues that because we evolved from lower creatures like lobsters, we inherited dominance structures from them. Inequalities of various kinds arent wrong; theyre natural.

We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones, he writes. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The relationship between human and lobster brains is outside Petersons area of academic expertise. Experts in the field who have evaluated his claims have found them lacking, as lobsters and humans neurological systems are radically different. One important distinction is that humans have brains and lobsters (technically speaking) do not.

If nervous systems were computer games, arthropods like lobsters would be Snake on a first-generation mobile phone and vertebrates would be an augmented reality (AR) game, as Leonor Gonsalves, a neuroscientist at University College London, puts it in a review of Petersons argument at The Conversation. The human brain is hugely malleable ... believing that it is natural that some people are losers because thats what lobsters do can have dire consequences.

But Petersonian lobster theory, and the other things like it in the book, arent really questions of truth. Theyre about providing the sort of alienated young men who are attracted to his broader work a sense of purpose and meaning. It fulfills roughly the same role in their life as religion might; its perhaps unsurprising that Peterson is quite interested in the Bible and discusses it often.

I think his mass following suggests the existence among a substantial cross-section of young men of a deep hunger for moral order that may well be ultimately a religious yearning, Yuval Levin, vice president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, tells me. Peterson is actually fairly careful to distinguish the teaching hes offering from an explicitly religious teaching, but I think he does that because he grasps that some significant portion of the people looking to him are really looking for something like a religious teacher.

The difference is that Peterson is reaching people who, for whatever reason, arent getting what they need from organized religion alone. In fact, some of his followers are actively hostile to religion, seeing it as fundamentally irrational. Hes a moralist who can appeal to the New Atheist set, even though he doesnt share their hostility to religion.

This aspect of Petersons work is far more sympathetic than his ill-informed and frankly nefarious politics especially since some of his cardinal rules, like tell the truth, are perfectly good moral precepts to live by.

Its worth watching a five-minute excerpt from a BBC interview about his role as a mentor for young men. Peterson openly starts to cry at the beginning:

Last night, I was at this talk I gave. And about a thousand people came, and about 500 of them stayed afterward. And most of them are young men, Peterson says, starting to tear up. And one of them after another comes up and shakes my hand and says, Ive been listening to what youve been saying ... I started cleaning up my room, and working on my life, and Ive started working hard on myself, and I just want to thank you for helping me.

When you watch this interview, you get a sense of what Peterson must have been like with his patients as a clinical psychologist empathetic, passionate, deeply concerned with the welfare of his patients. Its moving, really.

But Peterson has inextricably intertwined his self-help approach with a kind of reactionary politics that validates white, straight, and cisgender men at the expense of everyone else. He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems.

This painful contrast is on display later in that very interview, in which he explicitly argues that concern for sexism is to blame for the plight of the Wests young men.

Were so stupid. Were alienating young men. Were telling them that theyre patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture, he says. Its awful. Its so destructive. Its so unnecessary. And its so sad.

The empathy that he displays for men and boys in his BBC interview and 12 Rules for Life is touching. The problem is that he cant seem to extend it to anyone else.

For more on Jordan Peterson, including a short interview with Peterson himself, listen to the May 14 episode of Today Explained.

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Jordan Peterson, explained - Vox

When he published The God Delusion in 2006, Richard Dawkins might have been disappointed to learn that even 14 years later a self-help guru steeped in Christian teachings can still attract a large, devoted following. The New Atheists, such as Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, seemed to conquer all before them in the noughties, but the years following were hardly a victory for sober reason over passionate belief.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist by training, came to fame in 2016 protesting Bill C-16, a proposed Canadian law which he claimed would compel him to use peoples preferred pronouns. Legal experts disagreed, but the once obscure academic became a focal point in a stewing culture war throughout the English-speaking world and a guide for many feckless young men.

In the British case, Petersons most memorable moment was a clash with Channel 4 News Cathy Newman in January 2018. In the interview, Peterson laid out the thesis of his new self-help book, 12 Rules For Life, arguing among other things that men should take responsibility for their lives if they wanted to be suitable partners for women.

Newmans reception of Peterson during the uncut half-hour posted on YouTube was uncharitable, with the interviewer alleging that Peterson was indifferent to womens interests in the gender pay gap debate and linking him to the alt-right. Even The Atlantic, a progressive American publication, held it up as a case study in hyperbolic misrepresentation. But the battle lines had been drawn around Peterson, whose views were dangerous to his critics and life-changing to his fans.

After the book tour, Petersons own life hit a snag. His wifes diagnosis with terminal illness led to an increase in his intake of benzodiazepine, which he had previously started taking to deal with anxiety. This led to what his daughter described on YouTube as a physical dependency, with Peterson spending eighteen months between hospitals in places as far flung as Russia and Serbia.

All this happened away from the Internets glare, until Peterson returned to the medium that made him famous. In a YouTube vlog in October, Peterson described the difficulties he had faced over the past two years, saying that he had only just recovered sufficiently to return to work.

Surprisingly, for a Western internet celebrity in 2020, his next steps included lectures and videos on the biblical texts Exodus and Proverbs. This followed his earlier analysis of Genesis a project which included a lecture video that has gathered 6.6 million views.

With Gods grace and mercy, Peterson says he can pick up where he left off, which suggests that the Christian belief he has previously professed remains. What his faith means in practice is tricky to define, with at least one interviewer having to wrench a straightforward admission of Christianity from him.

The gurus reticence about describing himself as a Christian is less to do with modern Western squeamishness about the old faith and more because he is a stickler for accuracy in speech. Indeed, a conversation with the New Atheist podcaster Sam Harris foundered when the pair could not agree what truth meant.

Despite the equivocation, there seems something significant about Petersons faith in our era, his rise having coincided with a new emphasis among English-speaking intellectuals about the Christians roots of the West. The historian Tom Hollands Dominion is the most prominent work to argue that Christian assumptions still underpin Western societies, even as the church pews empty.

Much of Petersons message is similarly old fashioned. The first chapter of 12 Rules For Life instructs readers to stand up straight with your shoulders back to present an assertive stance to others. This emphasis on personal responsibility runs through his message, with another chapter telling us to set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

A lot of this advice is good, if obvious and sometimes haphazard. It is scorned because it lacks the intellectual sophistication that many of his critics are comfortable with, save when Peterson delves into the kind of mystic theological musings that our atheistic public life has little experience in. We could do without the mumbo-jumbo, but that doesnt invalidate the core message.

Critics can take comfort in the fact that the Wests increasingly godless youth are unlikely to find faith in the divine anytime soon, whatever the messianic leanings of figures like Peterson. The problem, as Dawkins might lament, is that when people stop believing in God, other figures sometimes suffice.

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Who is Jordan Peterson? | TheArticle

Former University of Toronto Professor of Clinical Psychology Jordan Peterson recently received a flurry of condemnation for a tweet in which he criticizedSports Illustrated's choice to put plus-size model Yumi Nu on the magazine's cover. His tweet (below) not only criticized her looks, but also suggested that her appearance was an authoritarian attempt by the left to force people like him to appreciate her beauty.

The backlash to Peterson's comments was swift and broad, and included social media influencers; online political commentators (likeHasan Piker andVaush); independent news outlets (like The Young Turks); mainstream news sources (NBC News, New York Post); and even international news outlets (The Independent, and Toronto Sun). In America's current political climate, incidents like the one caused by the aforementioned tweet are becoming more common as culture war issues are at the forefront of the public mind. Popular intellectual figures like Peterson have built their careers off of stoking these hot-button issues and then claiming that they are being persecuted when others disagree with them.

Interestingly, much of the blowback ignored Peterson's follow up tweet (above), in which he justifies his position by linking to scientific articles that purportedly validate his opinion. Peterson raises an interesting question: Can science be used to measure whether or not someone is attractive? While some recent studies have tried to do just that, far more studies refute these claims.

The sociology of human sexuality and race has long held that concepts like beauty and race are social constructions determined by a range of cultural, biological, and other complex social factors. On some innate level, just about everyone recognizes this truism; famously, it was embodied in the classic The Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder," whose lesson is that beauty is a local characteristic rather than a universal one. Yet, the intellectual dark web (of which Peterson is an adherent) and practitioners of this kind of "science" try to apply their model to nearly everything linking and reducing all kinds of aspects of human behavior as serving an evolutionary function.

The crowd that engages in this type of oft-sophistic debate over beauty should be familiar to anyone who follows the machinations of this latest iteration of the culture wars. Sometimes dubbed the Intellectual Dark Web (or IDW for short), they constitute a group of disgraced academics and other pseudo intellectuals (including podcaster Joe Rogan, and conservative commentator Dave Rubin) who claim that their voices are being silenced by traditional institutions who have become overly concerned with political correctness or "wokeness."

Peterson's claims run the full spectrum of biological determinism, from justifying social hierarchies as natural to claiming patriarchy should be the preferred organizing principle in societies.

However, researchers in the field of evolutionary studies (an area which focuses on how much of our behavior is a product of our biology) whose work is well-regarded tend to be far more cautious than Peterson and his ilk in their claims as to what we can definitely say about the so-called science of beauty. Against the overly deterministic model posed by the IDW, current consensus among scholars in this field is that human "nature" is a complex combination of biology and other social factors. These researchers are quick to note that they can't tell us with any great deal of precision what their findings necessarily mean for society at large.

The kind of model advocated by the IDW more closely resembles that of the 18th and 19th century biological determinism the kind that served as the basis for eugenics programs in Nazi Germany and even here in the United States. Peterson's claims run the full spectrum of biological determinism, from justifying social hierarchies as natural to claiming patriarchy should be the preferred organizing principle in societies. He also appears, at points in his book, to vindicate violent men like the Buffalo shooter or the Uvalde shooter by asserting that young men have to endure an unfair burden. To say that the ideas espoused by Peterson and the IDW connect to white supremacist ideology is more than just conjecture, as their ideas are observably trickling down from academia to far-right groups online.

RELATED:How the far right co-opted science

Indeed, the parallels between the rhetoric of the Buffalo shooter, and of the rhetoric espoused by Peterson and the like, are eerily similar. Far-right groups rejoice in Peterson's claims that hierarchies are natural and good for society, as they serve as a "legitimate" scientific basis for promoting racist ideologies. Laced throughout the manuscript left behind by the Buffalo shooter are references to a range of claims espoused by race scientists. These include tweets, memes, and links to prominent thinkers in this field like Steven Pinker and his colleagues who have published and espoused flawed literature directly cited by the shooter. The most infamous of these models is Charles Murray's book "The Bell Curve," in which he argues that intelligence and race are correlated the implication being that most people of color are "naturally" somehow less intelligent.These models continue to be invoked by prominent academics like Stanley Goldfarb, a former Dean of Medicine and current faculty at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, who also opposes anti-racist efforts in medicine.

Taken together, these events suggest that biological determinism has permeated the ivory tower of academia more than many realize. While some of the examples mentioned here are explicit in their bigotry, there are far more cases of miscommunicated or poorly communicated scientific research being co-opted by far-right groups.

Some anti-racist academics in genetics have criticized their colleagues (above) and called for change from within. They emphasize that scientists can and should protect against the exploitation of their work in recognizing the importance of clearly communicating their findings.

When scientists fail to consider the ways their ideas might be used, for good and for bad, the results can be disastrous. Such was the case when some sociologistslevied a social constructionist critique of the use of the psychiatric system, which was subsequently used by conservatives to justify dismantling the state public health system in the United States. Scientists must use caution when trying to convey their ideas lest they be used to justify heinous acts, including terrorism.

The radicalization of the Buffalo shooter should serve as a warning to other scholars, as he was one in a long line of domestic terrorists who relied heavily upon "race science" to justify their actions.

The radicalization of the Buffalo shooter should serve as a warning to other scholars, as he was one in a long line of domestic terrorists who relied heavily upon "race science" to justify their actions. The same kinds of logic have also motivated people to commit heinous attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.

While the Buffalo shooter may have lacked the scientific literacy necessary to understand the studies he cites, researchers must work to not be complicit in this process. Whether it be scientific racism to justify one's beliefs, or a lack of full consideration as to the larger impact of one's findings, scientists need to better understand how working in science is a social activity. Science itself is a powerful tool when used in pursuit of helping lead the way towards the betterment of society, and it is equally a tool for harm when used to naturalize hierarchies and inequality found throughout society.

Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer famously wrote a critique of instrumental reason, in which Horkheimer argued that science could be co-opted if it was not consciously guided by those practicing it. This was the focus of his classic work, "The Eclipse of Reason," in which he showed how the Nazi party weaponized science by treating it as an end to itself, rather than a tool to be harnessed in pursuit of an goal. Today we face the same issues and problems in science, and for our collective good we must decide to what ends these tools are used and what we as a society wish to prioritize.

Read more on race and pseudoscience:

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Discriminating tastes: Why academia must tackle its "race science" problem - Salon

Reading Time: 4 minutesConservative podcaster Matt Walsh speaks with the Maasai Tribe of Nairobi, Africa, in search of an answer to the question, What is a Woman?. Screenshot: Youtube/TheDailyWire

In January, an episode of The Dr Phil Show was dubbed controversial in which trans activists debated conservative podcaster Matt Walsh over the topic of gender ideology and identity.

Walsh argued against the introduction of transgenderism to children and the use of non-gendered pronouns, but it was the issue of womanhood that revealed a critical chink in gender ideologys woke armour.

When asked the question, What is a Woman?, the trans activists were unable to define the term even though they repeatedly made the claim that trans-women were women.

Walshs everyman demeanour and composure in questioning is akin to the comical style of Michael Moore or Borat.

The absurdity of gender ideology was on full display as the activists struggled to give a coherent answer, leaning on vague nonsensical statements.

Clips of the exchange went viral and pressure from the radical left forced CBS and Hulu to pull the episode off their broadcasting services.

Encouraged by the fallout, Walsh and his Daily Wire colleagues have produced the entertaining, illuminating yet at times frightening documentary What is a Woman? that exposes the flawed logic behind the gender ideology movement.

Released on 2 June to coincide with the beginning of Pride Month, What is a Woman? takes the viewer around the United States and across the world on a mission to answer the question proposed in the films title.

Walsh lays the foundation for his investigation by seeking to establish definitions of sex and gender in use today through a range of well-balanced and eye-opening interviews.

While progressive protestors and gender ideology professors stammer their way to incoherency, it is the conservative responses given by the Maasai Tribe of Nairobi, Africa, and an elderly Star Wars shopkeeper which appear to be grounded in reality.

Walshs everyman demeanour and composure in questioning is akin to the comical style of Michael Moore or Borat. Its remarkably effective in creating the right environment for his subjects to open up, usually to their detriment.

The documentary touches upon key gender-related controversies such as the dominance of trans women in womens sports

An interview with a family therapist illustrates this perfectly as Walsh is affirmed for questioning his own gender after confessing a love of scented candles and the TV show Sex in the City.

Later, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson speaks on the dangers of therapists who focus on gender-affirming patients who have come to them with real problems.

The documentary touches upon key gender-related controversies such as the dominance of trans women in womens sports and the fear of some female athletes to voice concerns about engaging biological males, both in competition and in the shower room.

Most disturbing is a segment on the indoctrination of young children and the effects of transition surgeries.

Psychiatrist Miriam Grossman gives a history of the unethical techniques and studies that have shaped the transgender movement, while paediatrician Dr Michelle Forcier gives an unapologetic account on her use of dangerous puberty blockers, used to chemically castrate sex offenders, to transition children.

An emotional testimony on the painful effects of transition surgeries by trans man and founder of TReVoices, Scott Newgent, really hits home the sinister truth of the transgender agenda.

Newgent breaks down while revealing that this experimental surgery is being conducted on children without any discussion of the risks or its permanence.

What is a Woman? provides a fair scope of both leftist and conservative beliefs on core gender issues, however it could be a more robust resource for Christians if a little more time was given to those arguments against gender ideology and the transgender agenda.

It wouldnt be a Matt Walsh production if it didnt mention his best-selling childrens book Johnny the Walrus about a little boy whos forced, by the internet people, to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be.

But in the context of shining a light on the dangers of the indoctrination of children, Walshs unashamed plug is forgivable.

What is a Woman? provides a fair scope of both leftist and conservative beliefs on core gender issues, however it could be a more robust resource for Christians if a little more time was given to those arguments against gender ideology and the transgender agenda.

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"What is a Woman" Review - The Catholic Weekly

This is an odd looking graph of traffic to my latest YouTube video.

You might want to congratulate me on that sudden surprising surge of traffic in the middle of the night, but dont. Apparently, thats when the magical YouTube algorithm started recommending the video to others, and it brought an influx of Peterson worshippers, as the comments reveal.

all these years and you still cant get 10 k subs??? JP just hit 5 million and growing. Youre in the final stage of your life, stop being so jelous. Btw, you shpould check out JPs interview with Roger Penrose, eat your heart out.

But heres the thing: Im not concerned about traffic. I look at the most popular videos on the medium, and its garbage like Pewdiepie and the Paul brothers and bizarre twisted animated childrens videos designed to milk clicks out of babies. Im content with my tiny little niche. Ive also got a real job, fortunately, and the $50 my channel brings in every month is fine.

Then there are the feeble defenses of Peterson:

Peterson clearly states that what he is saying is highly speculative. If your going to critique the man at least do it honestly.

Theres a whole bit in my video where I point out that Peterson is flinging about the word speculation as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Useful speculation has to be built on some kind of empirical, testable framework. Peterson is lazy and doesnt do the work of justifying it.

Most common, though, are the people who deny his transphobia (the thing that made him famous!) and have a knee-jerk hatred of social justice.

I realize Petersons claims about consciousness traveling up and down the micro and macro levels is nonsense, but so are the accusations of transphobia towards Peterson and Dawkins. Myers never really bothers to explain how theyre transphobic. At least not in this video. I think Myers should maybe spend more time investigating his own biases and irrationalism than those of Peterson if he has such obvious blind spots.

I thought Petersons transphobic comments have been so thoroughly covered elsewhere that I didnt have to discuss them, and could focus on where he intrudes stupidly on my area of expertise, biology. I guess I was wrong. Do I need to make my next video about that? Id rather not, because Peterson is such a twit.

Of course, there are still swarms of anti-SJW clowns out there.

I am not going to talk much about Peterson, but here is my problem. PZ Myers is supposed to be a scientist and yet he lets social justice which has nothing to do with Science leak in.

I help a Transgender person overseas and help feed him and fix his bike, so this isnt about hate or anything, but pronouns and having many sexes is against the Scientific data.Its more like a problem with the mind itself and social justice should not be mixed with Science.

This is why I am upset, because if you are a Scientist, you should have NOTHING TO DO WITH STUFF THATS NOT SCIENCE AT ALL, its more pseudoscience than actual real science.

Disappointed in you PZ, I thought you would be better than that.

This is really shameful and I think thats worse than whatever Peterson is going on about.

What Scientific data is against pronouns and having many sexes? I suspect he couldnt name anything.

Im also unsurprised that there are people who think social justice should not be mixed with Science, but then have no problem at all with the irrational, unjust garbage that Peterson freely mixes in to his science-free babbling.

I guess Im going to have to make more spider videos to flush away these clowns and get my traffic down where its supposed to be.

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OH NO! If that's the audience, I don't want to be popular - Freethought Blogs