by Bruce Bawer
The Times of London does a hit job.
Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown clinical psychologist and
University of Toronto professor until his brave 2016 challenge to a
draconian Canadian law on transgender pronouns drew widespread
attention. Millions watched his brilliant, wide-ranging YouTube lectures
about life, truth, feelings, personality, and values. For a while there
he seemed ubiquitous, giving interviews and lectures around the world
and, in the process, becoming the planet’s most famous living public
intellectual. He published a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life.
Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For the last two years he’s been in
medical hell, experiencing torturous pain and being brought to the brink
of death by a puzzling malady that took him, in search of answers, to
hospitals, clinics, and rehab centers in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and
Serbia. Meanwhile his wife was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer
from which she now seems, miraculously, to have recovered. On top of
everything else, he, his wife, and his deeply devoted adult daughter all
contracted the COVID virus.
Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the
public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead
for the Sunday Times of London. The story
appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a
recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his
daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead. In the recording (which as of
Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and
forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long
torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the
microphone. Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling
Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson’s illness, complete with vivid
particulars. And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic,
sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.
But – and this is why Peterson felt compelled to post the audio of the interview – Aitkenhead’s piece for the Times
proved to be a masterpiece of pure snideness and dishonesty. She
reduced Peterson’s deep learning and richly nuanced wisdom about life to
“bracing advice about how to be a real man.” She caricatured the
multitudes of people whose lives he’s helped to turn around as “young
men who idolise him” as a “fantasy father figure.” Grotesquely
simplifying and vulgarizing his message, she described him as
“defend[ing] traditional masculine dominance.” Noting that his critics
view Peterson as “the respectable face of reactionary misogyny, and a
dangerous gateway drug to online alt-right radicalization,” she
certainly seemed to agree.
Even worse than Aitkenhead on Peterson was Aitkenhead on Peterson’s
daughter, who, as her father faced one health crisis after another,
appears to have played a heroic role in scouring the globe for doctors
who might understand what was going on and might know what needed to be
done. Aitkenhead’s passages about this topic were one long sneer:
If this was a movie, its director would unquestionably be the
28-year-old Mikhaila Peterson, CEO of her father’s company. She and her
Russian husband appear to have assumed full charge of his affairs, so
before I am allowed to speak to him I must first talk to her.
Unrecognisable from the ordinary-looking brunette from photos just a few
years ago, Mikhaila today is a glossy, pouting Barbie blonde, and talks
with the zealous, spiky conviction of a President Trump press
spokeswoman.
Barbie? Trump? What? Where did this nastiness come from? And what’s
Trump doing here? Admirers of Peterson who’ve heard him discuss his
family in interviews know that Mikhaila herself grew up with a horrific
illness that she overcame valiantly. Writing about that ordeal,
Aitkenhead was dubious, almost flippant:
According to her website she has suffered from juvenile rheumatoid
arthritis, an autoimmune disorder, since early childhood, which
necessitated a hip and ankle replacement at 17. Other symptoms — chronic
fatigue, depression, OCD, nose bleeds, restless legs, brain fog, itchy
skin, the list goes on — forced her to drop out of university, “and it
finally occurred to me that whatever was happening was likely going to
end in my death, and rather soon. After almost 20 years, the medical
community still had no answers for me.” So she decided to cure herself.
Eliminating everything from her diet except for red meat, Mikhaila
found herself getting well. In 2018, Peterson adopted the diet too, and
was pleased with the results. Good for them. I don’t pretend to know
anything about these matters; all I know, without having looked into the
details of their regimen, is that I don’t see any reason for them to
lie about it, and that every indication is that Mikhaila is an estimable
and conscientious woman who has at all times only wanted the best for
her father. But for Aitkenhead, Mikhaila was, quite simply, a dangerous
quack and Peterson a patsy.
In the recorded interview, Mikhaila, knowing she’s talking to a
reporter, is at pains to get every detail right, down to the dosages of
various drugs; but for Aitkenhead, the young woman’s impressive mastery
of these specifics merits only mockery:
Like every medical autodidact I’ve ever met, Mikhaila rattles off
pharmacological jargon at 100 miles an hour, sweeping from one
outlandish tale to another with breathless melodrama that becomes
increasingly exhausting to follow.…By now my head is spinning. The
blizzard of obscure pharmaceutical terminology keeps on coming, as
Mikhaila reels off the names of more antibiotics and antidepressants and
antipsychotics prescribed to her father, recounting her objections to
this one and that one until it all becomes a blur.
Well, one wants to say, nobody forced you to do the interview.
Appallingly, Aitkenhead asserted that after her 80-minute conversation
with Mikhaila, “the one thing of which I’m certain is that, were I as
close to death as she assures me her father repeatedly was, this is not
the person I would entrust with saving my life.”
The uncomfortable truth, however, seems to be that Mikhaila did
save his life. These things happen. Jordan Peterson is not the only
person with a mysterious malady ever to have been rescued by the
tireless efforts of a fanatically determined loved one to track down
just the right doctor, the right hospital, the right diagnosis, the
right therapy. Some of us have learned through experience that, yes,
doctors can be ignorant, stubborn, lazy, indifferent, or just plain
busy, and that a smart layman willing to put in the work can learn a lot
more about this or that recondite malady than an off-the-rack
specialist is likely to know.
You might think that Aitkenhead would grasp this, and would
recognize Mikhaila’s breathless account of Peterson’s medical journey as
a story of the triumph of love and determination over even the most
horrific of circumstances. But no. For her it’s all one big “medical
circus.” For her, all that matters is that Mikhaila “doesn’t have any
medical training.” Asked about this, Mikhaila replied that “because of
my experience of being ill, I’ve done a lot of research. There’s this
trust people have of doctors that I don’t have. Because doctors are just
people, right?” On the tape Aitkenhead responds to this attitude with
empathy; in the article, she mocked it: “This opinion is not uncommon in
North America, where surprising numbers regard YouTube as a viable
substitute for medical school.” Oh, those stupid North Americans! You’d
think that Mikhaila, instead of simply making endless phone calls and
writing endless e-mails to track down the right doctors, had prescribed
drugs and performed surgery.
As dismissive as she was of Mikhaila’s efforts to find a proper
diagnosis and cure for her father, Aitkenhead was eager to proffer her
own diagnosis. What if his book tour – “a different lecture each night
at 160 cities in 200 days,” during which was “busy dispensing advice to
fans about their mental health” – crashed his mental health?
Could “toxic masculinity…have been a culprit”? Could his illness be the
price he paid “for his bootstrap philosophy”? She also seems
deliberately to have tried to get everybody to think that Peterson is
schizophrenic – a lie that media around the world have repeated in the
last few days.
Aitkenhead palpably relished the idea “that when life became
excruciatingly stressful, Peterson’s stand up, man up, suck it up
mentality didn’t work” – that “when the most famous public intellectual
on the planet was preaching a regime of order and self-discipline, he
was privately in chaos.” In fact, the tale of how Mikhaila went the
extra mile – thousands of miles, really – to save the life of her father
is something right out of a Jordan Peterson lecture. So, for that
matter, is Peterson’s ability during his spin through hell to write a
whole new book, Beyond Order, which is about to be published.
But for Aitkenhead all of this was little more than a good excuse
for her to mention once again the 45th president of the United States:
“Parallels with Donald Trump come to mind; another unhappy man closed
off from his emotions, projecting strong man mythology while hunkered
down in a bunker with his family against the world.” No one who has seen
a representative sampling of Peterson’s online lectures and interviews –
or who has heard him break into tears on the recording of his
conversation with Aitkenhead – could ever describe him as “projecting
strong man mythology” or as an “unhappy man closed off from his
emotions.”
As of Wednesday evening, Aitkenhead’s interview had garnered almost
three thousand comments, almost all of them justifiably accusing her of
misrepresentation and slander and calling her article a “hatchet piece.”
A reader named Russell Sharpe commented: “If anyone were in any doubt
why people nowadays go to longform podcasts for intelligent reflection
on contemporary issues rather than to the legacy media, where they know
to expect only conventional platitudes, disinformation and lies, then a
comparison of this article with the unedited audio interview now
available on Mikhaila Peterson's YouTube channel would be a good place
to start.”
One commenter was puzzled as to how Aitkenhead could be so
heartless, given her own personal history. Knowing nothing about
Aitkenhead, I looked her up. It turned out that she has had cancer –
and, moreover, like Mikhaila Peterson, has challenged orthodox medical
treatment. In 2016, she wrote for the Guardian about
her discovery that “there are ways to ease” the horrors of chemotherapy
“that feature in none of the official advice.” Despite her mockery of
Mikhaila’s all-meat diet, Aitkenhead herself, in her 2016 article, urged
chemo patients to fast, citing an arcane study’s preliminary finding
that “periods of severe fasting significantly increased the efficacy of
chemotherapy.”
That’s not all. In 2016, Aitkenhead published a memoir, All at Sea, about
her ten-year relationship with a man named Tony who couldn’t have been
more different from Jordan Peterson. I will quote from it at some length
because her relationship with this thoroughly vile fellow is
fascinating when viewed in light of her ugly take on Peterson. Tony, she
wrote,
began his career as “a highly proficient hustler” in Soho, London,
where he haunted “the clip joints and late-night illegal drinking dens,
promising fictional pornographic beauties to gullible tourists and
passing off bags of tea leaves for cannabis, before disappearing into
the shadows with pockets crammed full of cash.” After shooting up some
pimps and spending five years in prison for it – mostly in solitary
because of his hyperaggressive personality – he “became a violent
gangster who made a lot of money out of drugs, gunrunning, protection
and so forth,” although eventually, after marrying and having a
daughter, he “wound up the more ostentatiously lawless aspects of his
criminal lifestyle, and confined his business concerns to the discreet
wholesale trade of cocaine.” Somewhere along the way he became a crack
addict.
Then Aitkenhead entered the picture. She and her husband, Paul, were
Tony’s neighbors in London, and while Paul was away in Afghanistan, she
and Tony grew intimate. “Why I did not find [his crack addiction] more
off-putting was a puzzle,” she claims. But he had such “magnetism.”
Also, “charm.” Plus “beauty, mesmerizing to the point of hypnotic.”
Aitkenhead even admits that she may have been attracted to Tony not
despite but because of his criminality. “I very much hoped it was the
former,” she wrote, “and thus pleasing proof of my good liberal
credentials. I worried that it could be the latter, and nothing but the
cheap thrill of vicarious transgression.”
Of course, the whole thing was a cliché: white lefty journo falls
for black “bad boy.” Her attraction to criminals and drugs was hardly a
secret: she’d written a whole book, The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E (2002), about (to quote a Guardian
review) her “global quest for the perfect ecstasy tab,” which led her
to some of the seamier corners of South Africa, Thailand, Detroit, San
Francisco, and Amsterdam, and into the company of “leading figures in
the drug gangs.” Anyway, Tony and Aitkenhead left their spouses and
spent ten years together until, on vacation in Jamaica, Tony was swept
out to sea while trying to rescue one of their two sons (who survived).
To judge by the testimony of Aitkenhead, the woman who loved him,
the best thing you can say about Tony is that he perished while
performing a selfless act. But he lived the life of a total creep,
profiting from doing great harm to others. In this regard he was the
polar opposite of a man like – oh, let’s see – Jordan Peterson. Which
raises a question: what to make of a woman like Decca Aitkenhead, whose
moral compass appears to point due south? She hooked up – and had two
kids – with a total reprobate, knowing that he’d brought pure evil into
heaven knows how many lives; but she’s capable of cruelly ridiculing a
man who’s done so much good for so many people and who’s still
laboriously climbing out of the pit of hell.
How exactly does that work? Is Aitkenhead so defined by the most
fatuous and ethically perverse kind of leftist ideology that she’s
capable of finding an appealing rebelliousness in a savage monster like
Tony but can only be outraged by an extraordinarily sensitive and gentle
soul who speaks eloquently about personal responsibility and who openly
struggles to practice it, even when times are toughest? Does Peterson’s
day-to-day struggle to be a better husband, father, friend, teacher,
neighbor, and fellow citizen strike too close to home for this woman who
wrote a book about her struggle to find the best tab of Ecstasy? Does
she experience his very life, which has been focused for decades on
helping other people to be better human beings, as a personal rebuke to
her own life, which for a long time, anyway, was by her own account
focused on the most puerile kind of self-indulgence? Has his
determination to dig deeper and deeper into himself, in a preternatural
attempt to comprehend, to correct, and to cultivate, shamed her own
chronic superficiality?
How else to explain someone who, having lived for ten years with an
odious thug like Tony, manages to see Jordan Peterson, of all people, as
an embodiment of toxic masculinity?
Or is Aitkenhead, when you come right down to it, just one more
supremely callous – indeed, sociopathic – left-wing hack who will
destroy anyone to get a juicy story? Maybe it’s really just that. Let’s
face it: when you look at what the New York Times and The Washington Post have been doing every day for the last few years, why should any of us be surprised that the Times of London is capable of running a surpassingly disingenuous profile of someone whose greatest offense is being a good man?
Can it be that we owe Aitkenhead, and the Times, a debt of gratitude for showing us just how nakedly hostile the leftist media are, in 2021, to sheer decency?
Investigating Aitkenhead’s background, I ran across one curiosity. A Guardian review by Ian Penman of her Ecstasy book began as follows:
Where is Decca Aitkenhead's The Promised Land coming from?
Is it a drugs book? Traveller's confessional? Political reportage? All,
or none, of the above? There ought to be a German word for it: gimmickschwerk,
say. In an ingeniously disingenuous introduction to a determinedly
tentative book, Aitkenhead claims that even she doesn't really know for
sure any more.
Reading this, I was reminded immediately of the opening lines of Aitkenhead’s piece on Peterson:
I thought this was going to be a normal interview with Jordan
Peterson. After speaking with him at length, and with his daughter for
even longer, I no longer have any idea what it is. I don’t know if this
is a story about drug dependency, or doctors, or Peterson family
dynamics — or a parable about toxic masculinity. Whatever else it is,
it’s very strange.
Yes, very strange. Very strange indeed.
Bruce Bawer
is a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/crucifying-jordan-peterson-bruce-bawer/
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