Canada's Courts rule on Jordan Peterson: "As close to 'junk science' as anything that I have ever been asked to consider"

Ontario and Manitoba courts were unsparing in their assessment rejecting Peterson's "expert" testimony. And it's a pattern when it comes to Peterson's pronouncements.

Dr. Jordan Peterson has built an international reputation, as a best-selling self-help guru and “public intellectual,” because he seems to have an explanation for and an opinion on everything.

Now there are notable “public intellectuals” who reached their status because of a major contribution or breakthrough in human understanding - Marshall McLuhan’s insights into media were profound, and even prophetic. While Noam Chomsky may be known more today as a cultural critic, he gained fame in linguistics when he ushered in a new understanding of human development and language. There are others - philosophers like Bertrand Russell, economists like John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman who played major roles in shaping entire disciplines. They were intellectuals who advanced or changed their field of study.

That does not describe Peterson.

Peterson largely rose to great public prominence in 2016 when he protested that federal legislation in Canada adding gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination, claiming that his free speech was being infringed, and he ended being elevated to a major figure in the “culture war,” which has made his work profoundly political.

Peterson argued that government was enforcing “compelled speech.” Peterson was posing as a free-speech martyr, and the people who opposed him accused him of being a bigot.

Set aside the moral or political debate for whether what he was talking about was true in the law. It wasn’t. That is not how the law works in Canada. He was wrong on the facts, the law and the politics.

A brief legal primer

First, as a legal matter, which may surprise Canadians, especially when it applies to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms only applies to government. Our constitution reads:

This Charter applies

(a) to the Parliament and government of Canada in respect of all matters within the authority of Parliament including all matters relating to the Yukon Territory and Northwest Territories; and

(b) to the legislature and government of each province in respect of all matters within the authority of the legislature of each province.

Your rights and freedoms set out the ways governments are supposed to leave you alone, but rights aren’t absolute. because the commitment is freedom for everyone - and that means having to respect others’ freedom as well as your own. It’s about freedom- which involves responsibility, including responsibility to getting the facts straight. That requires legal boundaries, which have always existed, in order to ensure we have freedom, and not a free-for-all, or anarchy.

That means setting up procedures and due process to make sure that when government does interact with your life you’re treated fairly, and the same as everyone else. That’s what’s supposed to happen, and it’s the basic principle of liberal democracies.

People sometimes say that we talk too much about rights, and not enough about responsibilities. The “responsibility” part is your responsibility to obey the law - which is there to hold people to account, including for their bad acts, in contract, family, civil and criminal law.

In Canada, most civil and human rights are under provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government has no say.

Universities are conspicuous by their absence from the list of institutions where the Charter of Rights applies. While this might seem paradoxical, one reason is that it out of respect for the autonomy of universities to self-govern, and that free inquiry can take place there, and the courts have generally found that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply.

While the U.S. has the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech, in Canada, we don’t say “freedom of speech” because the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms actually covers expression, and not just speech.

It is different than the U.S., because Canada has different, and harsher, libel and defamation laws than the U.S. does, including a “criminal libel” law where journalists or other individuals can face jail time. It was used, notoriously, by billionaire and convicted rapist Peter Nygard, when he threatened reporters with jail.

And a point about all of this, including freedom of speech: there have always been libel and defamation laws in place to hold people to account for when they say harmful things that are untrue. The harm is almost always financial - in part because that is a harm that is measurable and easy to prove.

There have also long been laws against child pornography, which is not considered freedom of speech, nor are various kinds of threats and communication for the purpose of criminal conspiracy.

It has been argued that the principle of freedom of speech is for the purpose of attacking ideas, not for attacking people.

The truth matters, and so does the possibility of real harm when people believe something that is false. It can be a lie, a mistake, but false cures can kill people and false rumours can end careers and ruin lives.

So freedom of speech has never allowed falsely accusing someone of a crime. Accuracy and facts matter.

This is also the case with univerities. Research universities do more than teach, they create new knowledge about the world, and history. Students are there to learn, and discover, and they can learn multiple perspectives, not just one - but’s it's still supposed to be backed up by empirical evidence and critical thinking.

People are there to learn, and to learn to think, especially learning about all the many ways we fool ourselves and get things wrong - in science, law, and the humanities, so that we get things right. Each of these disciplines has its own standards - but that is what makes them disciplines.

Just as freedom of speech, and freedom of expression does not encompass telling or spreading lies, free inquiry on campus doesn’t mean you run your mouth like you would on an unmoderated social media forum. You’re supposed to act like a responsible adult, not someone repeating out loud what they’ve read scrawled on the wall of a public toilet.

Which is to say, you’re expected to be able to back up what you say, while recognizing both that there are still fundamental limits to human knowledge, there are still things we know with great certainty - just not total certainty.

Finally, people are allowed to choose to waive their rights, and even sign them away. People are routinely required to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) which forbid the public disclosure of information, although not to police or courts.

Peterson in Court: Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse

In addition to his PhD in Jungian Psychology, Peterson has an undergraduate degree in Political Science, so his lack of awareness of these legal and political issues is surprising.

His claim that the government was going to compel him to say things he didn’t want to say was not legally coherent, for the very reason that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply at the university that was his place of employment.

He complained that he would be forced to use pronouns he did not want to. Because the charter does not apply, Peterson can’t make a Charter complaint - but neither can people who are offended by him.

Peterson’s argument was similar to the inaccurate arguments made by opponents of same-sex marriage in the 2000s in Canada. At the time, two completely separate pieces of legislation were making their way through the federal government.

One was same-sex marriage. If you consider marriage and the civil laws that govern it to be a public institution, governments could not justify letting straight couples in but not gay ones. That means provincial marriage commissioners performing civil marriages, as representatives of government, could not discriminate. However, churches and places of faith are not representatives of government, and could refuse.

At the same time as the debate around same-sex marriage, a private member’s bill made its way through parliament that includes sexual orientation as a protected group when it came to hate crimes.

Conservative politicians told churches that if the two laws passed, together it would mean that if a church refused to perform same-sex marriages, that they could be charged with a hate-crime and lose their tax-free status. As we now know, that never happened.

Peterson has gone on to claim that Canada doesn’t have freedom of speech because the professional association of clinical psychologists has taken issue with the content of his tweets. While Peterson is claiming censorship, when you are an accredited professional, part of staying accredited means that you adhere to the standards of your profession.

All of this brings us to Peterson’s attempts to be recognized as an expert witness in courts in Canada, in a family law case as well as a case of manslaughter. The courts were pretty unsparing.

I have to give credit to David Hamer, a retired Ontario lawyer, for posting about this on Twitter.

https://x.com/DavidHamer_1951/status/1753383161893880036?s=20

“A seldom mentioned fact about @jordanbpeterson is that before he became a “public intellectual”, he tried to run a different gig alongside his then-professorial duties at the University of Toronto, presenting as an “expert” for litigants in various court cases. Under forensic examination, he did not fare well. Judges are notoriously polite in their choice of language when commenting on experts, but they were scathing about this good doctor. In one case, Peterson’s report was characterized as being “as close to junk science as I have ever been asked to consider”

There were two cases where Peterson wanted to be accepted as an “expert witness” by the courts, and the rejection by judges and courts of appeal are scathing, about Peterson’s failure to meet basic standards of science and evidence.

A Manslaughter case in Manitoba

The case in Manitoba was a serious one - a case of manslaughter where an individual was found beaten to death in his home, to which the accused had confessed. The only evidence was the confession.

Peterson and another psychologist were being asked to testify about false confessions.

In Peterson’s case, he used an online test personality test he had developed to screen employees for hiring prospects, that he had named “The Unfakeable Five”. The Justice wrote:

• “Dr. Peterson testified that there are five basic personality traits, which he says are well-recognized by psychologists – agreeableness, stress tolerance, conscientiousness, openness and extraversion.  He has developed a test to identify these traits, which he uses in his consulting business. 

• My concern is with the reliability of Dr. Peterson’s evidence in this regard.  As I said, Dr. Peterson has never met Pearce.  His analysis of Pearce’s personality is based entirely on the results of a personality test which he developed.  Even accepting Dr. Peterson’s evidence that this test is foolproof in identifying personality traits, I question the probative value of this evidence for the following reasons.

• First, Dr. Peterson created this test to identify the five basic personality traits that one finds in the average person, which Dr. Peterson identified as agreeableness, stress tolerance, conscientiousness, openness and extraversion.  That is to say, the test is not used to identify personality disorders or mental illness (considered relevant to the reliability of the confession in R. v. J.W.C., 2011 ONCA 550, (2011), 282 O.A.C. 23), cognitive ability (considered relevant in Balbar, supra) or unique characteristics that may make a person particularly vulnerable in an interrogation setting.

• Dr. Peterson has no prior experience with police interrogations and has never viewed a video of a police interview of a suspect. However, he testified that in assessing interview techniques and the reliability of answers provided by interviewees, an interview of a murder suspect by police would be no different than a job interview.

• In arriving at [his] conclusion, Dr. Peterson reviewed the transcript of the police interview and the transcript of the polygraph examination.  It is notable that he did not view the video of either, so he had no opportunity to observe Pearce.

• Dr. Peterson testified that a significant indicator of the reliability of the confession would be whether Pearce told police something about the crime that they did not know or disclosed information that had been held back by police.  He concludes that Pearce was only able to tell police that he hit Mark with a golf club because that information had already been given to him by police… In fact, Pearce had told the police about the golf club earlier in the interview.

• Insofar as the proposed evidence on the effect of interview techniques on the reliability of confessions is concerned, Dr. Peterson has no experience in this regard.  He has made no study of police interrogations.  In fact, he acknowledged that he has never seen a police confession and did not view the video of the confession in this case.  His experience regarding interview techniques is in situations, like job interviews, where the consequences of providing false information are benign by comparison to a murder investigation. Yet Dr. Peterson testified that the effect of improper interview techniques is the same in both situations.  

• It appears from his evidence (although this was never clearly explained) that this opinion is based on the idea that conducting an interview without leading or suggesting the answer to the interviewee is a skill which few people have.  Therefore, Dr. Peterson would say that when hiring an employee, for example, one should find out about the person in a way where there is no fear of tainting the results.  However, he referred to no scientific study about the “fear of contamination” in the context of police interrogations.   While it is easy to accept that a job interview may not give one a true picture of a person’s ability or aptitude for the job, Dr. Peterson did not explain why a person would be as susceptible to admitting to a murder when asked suggestive questions as he would be to exaggerating about his job skills.

• But, even assuming that Dr. Peterson’s theory translates from the job interview context to the police interrogation context, I am not satisfied that there is anything scientific about his opinion that interview results can be contaminated by suggestive questions. 

• Dr. Peterson has no experience in assessing the relevance of the trait to the reliability of a confession to a crime.

• The second concern that I have about Dr. Peterson’s evidence is that when questioned on the voir dire, his answers were so lengthy that they tended to frequently veer into areas that, while very interesting, were not pertinent to the matter before the court.” 

The matter went to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, where the case was overturned on a matter of law (the trial judge didn’t adequately instruct the jury), but which was equally damning. These quotes are verbatim from the judgment:

• “The judge ruled that Dr. Peterson’s opinion had two shortcomings.  He was not properly qualified as he had no experience in the area of the psychology of police interrogations.  Also, his opinion had no scientific qualities and was unnecessary.”

• “Dr. Peterson’s opinion was based on an online personality assessment that the appellant had completed called “the Unfakeable Big Five.””

• “I am satisfied that the judge did not err in her determination as to the admissibility of expert evidence from Drs. Peterson and Moore.”

Ontario Family Court: “as close to “junk science” as anything that I have ever been asked to consider.”

In a family dispute in Ontario, the respondent wanted Peterson to be able to testify in a family dispute on behalf of the husband.

Again, the judge refused, and for similar foundational reasons: he was one-sided and biased, and his assessments weren’t based in any scientific method, defined ideas or accepted processes.

As with the manslaughter case, he just accepted uncritically what he was told, in this case, what the husband told him about the wife’s parenting.

I have highlighted various comments for emphasis. These are taken verbatim from the court record:

• Dr. Peterson is a clinical, behavioural psychologist, with extensive training and experience in adult psychopathology, personality assessments, and cognitive assessments.  He has no experience or training whatsoever in custody and access assessments. 

• Dr. Peterson is not a child psychologist.  He does not take children as patients in his private practice.  Almost all of his experience with children relates to those who have behavioural problems, which is not the case here.

• Dr. Peterson did not ever see the applicant, with or without the children and had no access to any third party observations of or about her.  Aside from what was set out in the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report, all of his information about her came from the respondent.  As is detailed on many occasions in Dr. Peterson’s various reports, that information was almost universally negative.  Dr. Peterson himself admitted, when testifying during the voir dire, that his assessment of the respondent was one-sided and biased.  He also said that he had nothing to say about the applicant’s competency as a parent, and that he could not possibly compare the two parties as parents.   Those statements are rather puzzling to say the least since his various reports are replete with negative comments about her parenting.

•  I will deal next with Dr. Peterson’s report entitled “Multiple rater response to play assessment description From Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report”.  It is dated May 4, 2009.  This is perhaps the most interesting of all of the reports that counsel for the respondent wishes the court to consider.  It comes as close to “junk science” as anything that I have ever been asked to consider.  Dr. Peterson’s evidence was that he did not consider himself to be an objective observer, if only because he only saw the respondent.  Therefore, he took excerpts from the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report dealing with the observations of the play sessions with the children and each parent.  He then designed a questionnaire to explore the actions of the parents therein.  He then sent all that to what he describes as “22 colleagues, psychologists, social and child care workers”.  We know nothing of their experience.  Five persons responded to his questionnaire.  The following is Dr. Peterson’s description of those five:

  Three of these were psychologists.  Two were developmental clinical psychologists.  One was a former professor who had done gestalt therapy.  One was a child welfare worker with a degree in social work.  Once was a private neuropsychological rehabilitator with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and extensive experience dealing with children with severe behavioural difficulties.

  [20]       Even if Dr. Peterson testified as to why he choose those 22 people or what he understood to be the qualifications of those who responded, we would have no first-hand knowledge of any qualification that any of them might have to give evidence regarding custody and access assessments, or as to observations of the parties during the play sessions which would factor into such an assessment.  It is astonishing in my opinion that Dr. Peterson would feel that this was good science.

  [21]      The final nail in the coffin on this issue is that Dr. Peterson himself agreed with counsel for the applicant that if the observations of the first play session with the applicant and the children were affected by the fact that one of the children had slept poorly the night before, to only use that one play session in any comparison would be “apples and oranges”.

• I go next to the report dated May 6, 2009, entitled “Comments on of [sic] Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report Dated April 16, 2009”.  In large measure, this report is an attack upon the methodology of the assessment process.  This is surprising to say the least, as Dr. Peterson has admitted his total lack of experience or training in this field.  I do not myself claim any such training or experience.  However, as I said in my ruling of November 2, 2009, dealing with Mr. Barry Brown, I see dozens of custody/access reports every year.  Over the course of my career on the bench, I have seen hundreds of them.  I see them at the conference stage and at trials.  I am more than familiar with the methodology employed by individuals and institutions to produce a report of this nature.  The approach taken in the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report Dated April 16, 2009 does not depart from the norm.

  [26]      When it is not attacking the methodology, Dr. Peterson’s report attacks the logic of the connections made by the assessors and repeats the respondent’s view of past events.  Counsel for the respondent has already used this report in her cross-examination of the applicant and the authors of the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report.

  [27]      The apparent but unfounded arrogance of Dr. Peterson found throughout this report [and for that matter in some of the other reports] is troubling and give rise to the question of whether his reports are not biased in more than one fashion.  That there can be more than one type of bias when it comes to experts is explored by Professor David Paciocco in his article “Taking a ‘Goudge’ out of Bluster and Blarney: an ‘Evidence-Based Approach’ to Expert Testimony”.^[9]  On page 18 of his paper, Professor Paciocco lists and defines many possible types of bias, including: lack of independence bias; adversarial bias; selection bias; team bias; professional interest bias; association bias; and noble cause distortion bias.  I venture the opinion that Dr. Peterson suffers from at least two, if not three, of those.

• With respect to the allegations of abuse made by the applicant against the respondent, he said “my sense [emphasis in the original] is that there is nothing to distinguish spousal abuse and non spousal abuse”.  I took that as an admission that he had no experience in this area at all.  He also said that he could assess a person’s propensity for abuse and violence but admitted that he could not assess situational variables.  He also said that assessing a person’s temperament was a relatively inexact science.  Surely that statement alone would be grounds to exclude any opinion on that.  He also said with respect to “warped behaviour”, “intimidating behaviour”, and “controlling behaviour” that they could mean many different things, depending upon the context.  They are not clinical terms according to him.  Paranoia is a clinical term, but of course, the applicant’s use of that term was hardly clinical.  Thus Dr. Peterson’s opinion that the respondent did not show any tendency to paranoia is not that helpful.

  [35]      Of course, not having a propensity for anything does not exclude it happening.  I would hope that Dr. Peterson would agree with that.  Therefore even if Dr. Peterson were to persuade me that the respondent has no propensity for abuse of any kind, for violence of any kind, for anger of any kind, or for any tendency to over-control things and people in his life, I have to weigh the evidence on these issues along with all others.  To allow my conclusion to be swayed by Dr. Peterson’s assessment of the respondent’s lack of a propensity, seems to me would be to do what Justice Sopinka said what not to do in Mohan.  It would not be sufficiently reliable.

  [36]      In sum, I can see no manner in which the evidence of Dr. Peterson can be of help to me as the trier of fact.  For all of the reasons set out above, my ruling is that I will not allow him to testify as an expert.

---

Peterson is willing to expound, and present himself as an expert on issues where he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about, in something as serious as a trial for manslaughter and in a family law case.

He was willing to testify in court that the confession of a person charged with beat their lover to death with a golf club should be ignored because of their score on an online personality test designed for screening employees. He considered his test “foolproof,” did not watch the videotape of the confession and never met the accused. He only read the transcript of the interrogation, and he got crucial facts wrong.

In a family court where issues of children’s custody was at stake, he spoke only to the father, and not to the mother, but nevertheless drew negative conclusions about her parenting, to which he was willing to testify.

This actually goes straight to the issue of the real problem with Peterson, which is that he presents himself as a trusted authority, then goes on to get it profoundly wrong.

Peterson is articulate, quick to throw out an answer. He presents himself as an authority on all sorts of subjects, and does do with great confidence, even when there is no basis in fact or evidence to what he is saying, and even when he is completely wrong.

And this is an important point, because we have to tease apart the politics apart from this.

There are lots of people who don’t like Peterson’s political opinions and views, and so it gets framed as a free speech issue, or as a battle between right and left.

The deeper issue is that Peterson’s statements are disconnected from reality. There is no evidence or scientific proof to back up what he says, because he is in the wrong.

Because Peterson is seen as being attacked for his political views, he can present himself as a martyr, when the deeper problem is that he keeps misleading people on subjects where he has no idea what he is talking about, on serious issues.

That includes politics, the law, and history.

He falsely claims that Canada has no such thing as free speech, and that he is being persecuted, and it gets repeated by individuals like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Richard Dawkins, because they take his word for it.

Most recently, Peterson’s professional regulatory body is threatening to pull his license as a clinical psychologist - though he no longer practises - because they think the things he says on twitter are so unprofessional. Peterson is treating this as an attack by government on his speech, when it’s private self-regulation. Professions like doctors, nurses, lawyers and engineers (to name a few) all have and enforce high standards because when individuals in their professions don’t do their jobs properly, it ruins lives.

Peterson presents himself as a rebel against an oppressive system, turning himself into an underdog, when the problem is that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Not only does he presents unsound information with great confidence.

He is a YouTube influencer and self-help guru. He is a celebrity who rose to viral stardom because of he didn’t understand the law.

The problem is, the more you know anything about the subjects that Peterson talks about, the clearer it is that he does not know what he is talking about. It’s not just that his viewpoint or opinions are offensive, it’s that they are disconnected from empirical reality.

In July, 2020, Swedish historian Mikael Nilsson wrote this article in Haaretz, “Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler, the Holocaust and Nazism”. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s worth reading, because it shows that Peterson’s grasp of history is also not backed up by evidence.

He writes:

While Peterson’s hostile statements on feminism and what he calls "cultural Marxism" have been thoroughly dissected in the media, but his views on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Holocaust have not, bar a very few exceptions. Peterson, an academic who declares that he chooses his words "very, very, carefully" has made so many incorrect statements about Hitler that it verges on revisionism.

Peterson has repeatedly said that he has "studied Hitler a lot," but every statement he utters about Hitler makes this very hard to believe. It’s worth diving into Peterson’s unsettling understanding of Hitler, from his strangely generous framing of the Nazi leader, through his misrepresentation of chronology, his misuse of historical sources, to his odd re-writing of Holocaust history.

Starting with the "you gotta hand it to Hitler" quote above: The Nazi leader was not an organizational genius. Hitler failed at almost everything he ever tried to accomplish – bar genocide. Even strictly organizationally, the history of the NSDAP from 1920 to 1933 was fraught with internal conflict, and time and again Hitler would benefit from pure dumb luck.

Peterson has insisted that we must "give the devil his due" and that Hitler did "wonders for Germany’s economy during the first part of his reign." But the economic "wonder" of Nazi Germany is a Nazi propaganda myth. Economic problems were actually rife already by late 1934, and only got worse from there. Hitler’s many aggressive foreign policy actions and his accelerating persecution of the Jews during the second half of the 1930s were partly intended as distractions from the poor economy.

Astonishingly, Peterson argues that what was wrong with the Nazis was not that they were not civilized. In his view, "there’s more evidence, I think, that they were too civilized." This is an atrocious way of describing the most violently racist regime in history.

Peterson’s endless barrage of falsehoods includes the outrageous claim that "Hitler was elected" and "by a large majority too. It was a landslide vote; the kind of vote that no modern democratic leader ever gets." Hitler was not elected, and the NSDAP never received more than 37.27 percent in a free election (in July 1932). A small camarilla of conservative politicians, led by Franz von Papen, convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in a coalition cabinet.

Peterson consistently exhibits an extreme carelessness with facts and chronology regarding Hitler, National Socialism, and the Holocaust.

Mischaracterizing Hitler, and misrepresenting sources

Like most self-proclaimed laymen Hitler experts, Peterson loves anecdotes. He tells a story about how Hitler was sitting around with his buddies in the trenches, then went off for a while and returned to find his comrades were all dead; a shell had exploded and killed them all. Peterson exclaims: "That changes you!"

Sure, it would. There is only one problem: this never happened. It is an open question why Peterson would seek to offer an anecdote that presents Hitler as a victim of psychological trauma, even valorizing him.

(For anyone who wants an accurate understanding of Hitler’s rise to power, one of the best and most terrifying documentaries about Fascism and Hitler’s rise to power is Nazis: A Warning from History. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074kmy )

There is a consistent pattern here.

It’s not as if Peterson is the only influencer who is considered to be a public intellectual because they say things that are so baffling, and nonsensical, that people make the mistake of thinking they are saying something profound. Peterson met his match in the rambling philosophizing of Slavoj Zizek when the two debated each other in Toronto.

Stephen Marche at The Guardian wrote -

“… there was one truly fascinating moment in the evening. It came right at the end of Žižek’s opening 30-minute remarks.

“We will probably slide towards apocalypse,” he said. And Peterson agreed with him: “It is not obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us.” They are both self-described “radical pessimists”, about people and the world. It made me wonder about the rage consuming all public discussion at the moment: are we screaming at each other because we disagree or because we do agree and we can’t imagine a solution?

Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy.”

This is a critical point.

They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us

That is because neither Zizek nor Peterson know what they are talking about.

Noam Chomsky criticized Zizek saying

“Where’s the theory? Where’s the content? It’s just posturing’. I have watched a fair few videos of Žižek and I fail to find anything of substance/empirical in his discussions.”

That sums up both Zizek and Peterson: they are posturing, and there is nothing empirical to support their discussions. They don’t actually know history, or how capitalism, communism, liberal democracy actually work. They don’t have a working understanding the mechanics and workings of finance, the law, or government, science or medicine - all the forces that shape people’s lives and define democracies and economies.

Zizek and Peterson traffic in theories about theories, and if the evidence doesn’t fit, the theory prevails. This is totally unscientific - it’s not even knowledge. It’s the active dissemination of false information, and as the court record shows, Peterson is a repeat offender. His stream of bogus information continued throughout the pandemic with further provably false and evidence-free statements about vaccines, constitutional rights, evolution, biology, international affairs, and history.

And all of this matters, because even after courts decided Peterson’s questionable methods should not be used to influence a decision at the level of a manslaughter trial and family court case, his equally baseless ideas are being pushed as solutions on a much grander scale.

The issue is beyond politics and freedom of speech - it’s about whether Peterson can be believed as the authority he says he is. Evidence should decide that - not his own opinion of himself.

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