The upshot is that there are many people and groups vying for influence with this cohort, and although some of those people and groups are friendly and benign, some are malevolent exploiters. Among the former are Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk (when he was alive) and Turning Point USA; among the latter are Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Mamdani, Antifa, violent trans activists, and various incel “influencers.” I’m sure I left some out, but you get the picture. The competition exists on both right and left, but the struggle on the right is highlighted at the moment.

Charlie Kirk’s accused killer was definitely part of this group that was searching (I’m going to assume that Trump’s would-be killer was, too). Tyler Robinson is a young disaffected white male who spent an inordinate amount of his time gaming, and seems to have immersed himself in the violent trans activist movement as well as using some Antifa memes.

I’ve been thinking about all of this lately, and a few days ago I began wondering whether Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk had ever gotten together for a chat, and if so did they ever discuss this sort of topic. Sure enough, I discovered that they had, about six months ago. In the following YouTube interview, it’s also mentioned that Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk had met back in 2016 when Kirk was early in his career, and Kirk says he was inspired by Peterson. Not surprising, actually.

The following interview occurred six months ago, as I noted. But since then, Peterson has become gravely ill starting in August, although he’s said to be recovering. And of course Charlie Kirk was assassinated early in September. The whole interview is of interest, but I have cued up a 9-minute clip in which they begin by discussing the phenomenon on the left but Peterson immediately says it’s a growing problem on the right too and he was certainly correct. The phenomenon is the growing popularity of “influencers” with what’s called Cluster B traits and the dark triad or tetrad (see this for an explanation). They also talk about what it means to use the Lord’s name in vain:

Because he appears to be an example of this Cluster B dark triad type, please do not ignore the essentially “performative” and mocking nature of Fuentes. He’s like the Joker. It’s impossible to know what he really believes; perhaps nothing. His goals seem to be destructive and narcissistic: attention and power for himself, but perhaps mostly the power to destroy and to make people angry and uncomfortable, as well as to be admired by other Cluster B dark triad types, or just people who are lost and searching and happen upon him.

Christopher Rufo seems to understand this, too:

Rather than engage in the surface-level debate, conservatives should seek the deeper ground of reality and deconstruct the “metapolitics,” or underlying rules, of this conflict. Conservatives should do this by treating Fuentes as an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain.

I think that this is the best way to look at someone like Fuentes that I can find so far, and Fuentes is hardly alone although he’s the flavor du jour.

I also came across this video by Dinesh D’Souza speaking of the same phenomenon; he also discusses the “groypers” and their online activities. The section I’ve cued up is about 7 minutes long; if you’re impatient like me, though, I suggest speeding it up by changing the speed setting:

ADDENDUM: I decided it would be instructive to add this short clip. Kirk detested Fuentes and thought he was dangerous, not only didn’t ally with him but discouraged anyone from platforming him by debating him. Fuentes was extremely harsh in his criticism of Kirk. He also was quite open in his rivalry with Kirk for this group of young men they were both trying to reach:

Nick Fuentes to Charlie Kirk just days before he was murdered:

"I took your baby Turning Point USA, and I f**ked it. I just get a sick sense of satisfaction out of it. Mr. 'Family Man.'" pic.twitter.com/PgtbRR6V7L

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 28, 2025

The post The battle for the hearts and minds of disaffected, lost, and angry young men appeared first on The New Neo.

You can be jailed for social media posts that fall into some nebulously-defined “hate speech” category, and to make things even more ridiculous, at least one British cop, this one being Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, is arguably threatening to extradite people who make unacceptable social media posts — from Britain or even from “farther afield.”

It helps a bit to have a constitution that codifies the right to freedom of speech, as ours does. The Brits don’t have that.

But where there’s a will to subvert free speech, there’s a way, even with a First Amendment. However, note that the language of the First Amendment only discusses what Congress is barred from doing. Social media is not only the mechanism for the Brits to arrest people whose speech they consider hateful, but huge social media companies themselves can and do censor speech even without the government arresting anyone. This is certainly already true in the US, and has been for many years.

This past Thursday we also had this news from Canada. That link is to an essay written by Jordan Peterson, who was ordered to undergo re-education or lose his psychology license:

Canadians once again have a very hard choice in front of them. The Supreme Court has essentially decided (or, more accurately, failed to take responsibility and therefore decided by default) that the much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms can be completely ignored by the regulatory bodies that license professionals in Canada. There are two conclusions that must be drawn in the aftermath of this decision. The first is that the Charter itself is not worth the paper it is written on. If comparatively low-level bureaucrats can suspend its most important provisions, more or less at will, it is a document with no real force whatsoever. I suspected as much when it was implemented back in the 1980s, and it is certainly the case that my worst suspicions have been justified.

Worse, however, is the clear consequence for professionals and those they serve in Canada. My fellow citizens: it is now a legal requirement in your sad state for the lawyers, engineers, teachers, physicians, psychologists and social workers who serve you — often in your hours of most desperate need — to lie to you, in order to ensure they are not transgressing against the ideological assumptions of those who fly the flag of the radical left.

Chilling.

The post As the sun sets on British and Canadian liberty appeared first on The New Neo.

Here Peterson speaks about his reaction to the ruling and his plans to deal with it. If I was one of the heads of the College of Psychologists of Ontario, tasked with the re-programming of Jordan Peterson, I’d opt out at this point and pull an Emily Litella “never mind.” But somehow, I doubt they’ll be that smart.

The post Peterson to the re-education camps appeared first on The New Neo.

In the tweet prompting Twitter’s suspension, Peterson wrote, “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”

Twitter wrote that Peterson had violated its rules for “hateful conduct,” apparently because used Page’s given name; Page now goes by Elliott. He also referred to Page as “her,” thus implying Page is a woman.

One of Peterson’s aims has long been to resist compelled speech. That’s why he was bound to run into Twitter censorship sooner or later. I’m not sure it’s his first time, either, but I can’t imagine him retracting or changing what he wrote. I think one reason he wrote it may have been to purposely mount such a challenge to Twitter and see what would happen. If Twitter compels him to call the former Ellen Page “Elliott,” and to also refer to Page with the pronoun “he,” I would imagine Peterson would object for the obvious reasons. If he wanted to do it of his own free will, fine, but he does not want to be forced to say something he does not believe.

Peterson is a big fan of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote: “Live not by lies.” Here’s an excerpt from a book called The Solzhenitsyn Reader:

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.

For Peterson – if I understand him correctly, having watched a fair number of his videos – the important thing here is not what he calls Page. It’s why. We all are being required to acquiesce in what Peterson considers the fiction that Page is a man and always was. Certainly the latter – that Page was born a man and has always been a man – is something manifestly untrue except in woke circles and I suppose in Page’s mind. But everyone is now required to agree with the narrative, and Peterson thinks there’s a big cost in agreeing.

There is a cost, indeed.

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I noticed this new (to me, anyway) tendency to insist that subjective beliefs should hold sway over objective ones, and that in fact there was no such thing as objective truth. Sorry, I don’t buy that. Maybe there isn’t absolute and definitive truth, but some things are a lot truthier than others and someone like Peterson should be allowed to say so without being thrown off Twitter.

Would it have been better for him to have written a sentence that went this way, “Elliott Page just had his breasts removed by a criminal physician”? Peterson doesn’t want to write seeming nonsense (that Peterson does not believe) in order to please the left and Page, but that’s exactly what the left wants him to do.

When did the transgender movement lose a lot of people who were pretty okay with it prior to that? When advocates began moving the medical treatment ages further and further downward, and when they began insisting that a change of sexual identity (including surgery to remove sexual organs) was a change to affirm a sexual identity that had always been the case – that bodies and chromosomes have no reality, even as patients go to great surgical length to change their bodies in an attempt to fit a standard of sexual identity.

Orwell understood:

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

No, you can’t alter the past. You can only pretend, and try to force other people to pretend with you.

The post Twitter suspends Jordan Peterson: why? appeared first on The New Neo.

The Understand Myself assessment and report is based on the Big Five Aspects Scale, the scientific model that describes your personality through the (Big Five) factors and each of their two aspects.

Individual Report
The assessment only takes 15-20 minutes. Your resulting report will give you a comprehensive description of the factors and aspects of your own personality.

You will, for example, learn how agreeable you are relative to others, and how your Agreeableness breaks down into the aspects of Compassion and Politeness (deference to authority and social norms). You will also learn how these aspects of your personality influence how you act towards and react against the various people and situations you find yourself dealing with every day.

As an example of some of my results, I’m apparently way more compassionate than most people but way less polite. That’s no surprise. In person I’m actually quite polite in the conventional sense – I say “please” and “thank you” and “nice to have met you” and all that, but that’s not really what the test measures.

But on certain other dimensions – such as a subcategory called “orderliness,” I score in the basement. “Orderliness” on this test isn’t about being a hoarder or not – in my case it actually has to do with a deficit in planning skills and a dislike of predictable routine. And it also says this:

Those who are who are very low in orderliness are remarkably much less likely to be political conservatives.

I’m about as low on the “orderliness” scale as a person can get, and yet I’m a political conservative. Go figure.

One trait in which I score in the 98% percentile is “openness to experience.” For that trait it says: “Those who are liberal, politically, are very much more likely to be high in openness to experience than conservatives.” There we go again; I’m the opposite politically of what my personality scores would indicate.

Here’s an excerpt from the description of “openness to experience” [my emphasis]:

People with exceptionally high levels of openness to experience are almost always characterized by others as extremely smart, creative, exploratory, intelligent and visionary. They are extremely interested in learning, and are constantly acquiring new abilities and skills. They are extremely curious and exploratory. They are exceptionally interested in abstract thinking, philosophy, and the meaning of belief systems and ideologies. They live for cultural events such as movies, concerts, dance recitals, plays, poetry readings, gallery openings and art shows. They are very likely to enjoy writing (or even to be driven to write). They enjoy complex, abstract ideas and deeply love to confront and solve complex, abstract and multi-dimensional problems.

One intriguing thing the site offers is that if two people each take the test, you can ask it to analyze the type of relationship or marriage you will tend to have if you get romantically involved with each other.

The post By my profile I should be the most liberal of liberals appeared first on The New Neo.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more…

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE)… My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata…

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job…

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly…

Oh, you know what? Just click on the link and read the whole thing, because nearly every time I cut out a sentence it feels as though I’m cutting out something important.

Peterson is unafraid of the truth and of the consequences of telling the truth, traits that seem to be rather rare these days. In recent years he also has had the advantage of having built an enormous following by dint of his intensity, courage, hard work, and brilliance.

The post Jordan Peterson resigns his full professorship appeared first on The New Neo.

The post Jordan Peterson on the use of crises to curtail liberty, and as a religion substitute appeared first on The New Neo.

Same for parties of more than a few people, or traveling, or any number of things that they have no trouble recommending or even mandating for the peasantry (that’s most of us) but which they themselves flout when they feel like it.

Plus the fact that mandatory masks for the servers such as waiters and clerks in stores is another factor in creating an obviously tiered society. These rules are sometimes promulgated not by the government, but by the individual business, but the effect is nevertheless of a class system with visual signifiers.

In the beginning, masks were frowned on. Then they were recommended, sometimes mandated. But the rules themselves often have little logic, because – just to take one point of many – a person can wear an ineffective mask (single-layer cloth, for example), or even reuse a dirty one over and over and over, and still be in compliance.

At this point the masked sometimes give the unmasked dirty looks, or (less often) vice versa. And there is jewelry to attest to vaccination status for the virtue-signaling. And not just jewelry, and not just the vaccinated. Here’s a wide range of items, from necklaces and earrings attesting to a person having had the vaccine, to various sorts of T-shirts – as well as the much more rare anti-vax item, a logo showing an extended middle finger and the words “Vaccinate this.”

Perhaps the most ironic is this door sign with seasonal fall and Thanksgiving symbols and the word “WELCOME” on the first line and in somewhat smaller print on the second line, “VACCINATED GUESTS.”

Otherwise known as “non-lepers.”

I’m treating this subject somewhat lightly here, but it’s really not light at all. Perhaps if COVID posed a threat on the order of the Black Death, some of this divisive hysteria would be warranted. But at this point, when we know this is not true, the masks and all the other mandates are a mean of control. There will be others, and other crises to justify them.

I want to highlight a portion (about 17 minutes) of this recent Jordan Peterson video on the subject. I think this video is so good, and so important, that I’m going to give it its own post in a moment (if you find listening to videos too slow, I suggest you go to “settings” on the video and change the speed to a faster one):

The post The new aristocrats: masks for the masses, liberty for us appeared first on The New Neo.

This seems to be about two years ago:

The post Jordan Peterson on Marxism and neo-Marxism appeared first on The New Neo.

Ironically, the anti-Petersonians now seem far more fanatical than Peterson’s most faithful fans. This became clear in recent days, when some of Peterson’s critics — including, amazingly, a professor at the University of Ottawa — went online to express satisfaction that Peterson is being treated for dependence on benzodiazepine, an anti-anxiety medication.

That’s the way social media seems to work these days. Peterson has many enemies. I haven’t read what they’ve written, but any expressions of glee wouldn’t surprise me. To them, Jordan Peterson is a dangerous man because (among other things) he is defending free speech, and doing it in a very articulate manner. Till his illness.

His illness has been explained this way:

So: a man who has been open about his struggles with depression becomes addicted to prescription benzos (e.g., Valium), and nearly dies in detox … and lots of people who hate Jordan Peterson laugh at that.

Peterson has always seemed to me to be a strange combination of fragile and steel-strong. He obviously is a very intense and exceptionally intelligent person, and such people often live on a psychological razor’s edge. In addition, Peterson has never been the least bit shy about talking of his long history of depression, which runs in his family. One of his children has had major and unexplained health problems her entire life, perhaps of an auto-immune nature. And recently his wife – whom he met and fell in love with when they both were children in a small town in northern Canada – was diagnosed with what may be a fatal cancer.

Add that to the extraordinary pressure of his public life, and the schedule he keeps, and no wonder the man was taking tranquilizers. His idiosyncratic and severe symptoms while trying to withdraw may be just another example of his especially vulnerable constitution.

I hope for a full recovery, but this doesn’t sound good at all. Please send healing thoughts and prayers for Peterson and his family.

The post Jordan Peterson is ill, and his critics are happy appeared first on The New Neo.