Brownstone Institute
Jordan Peterson: Enemy of the State
From the Brownstone Institute
The famed psychologist and scholar, and global media personality, Jordan Peterson is being told that he must report to the Ontario College of Psychologists for re-education or else lose his license to practice. He is challenging the order in court, for whatever that’s worth.
No question that this follows his aggressive questioning of the whole of the Covidian agenda, including mass forced vaccination of the population.
It’s hardly the first time he has gotten in trouble with the powers that be. His initial fame came from his brave refusal to acquiesce to the “preferred pronoun” movement in Canada that came before lockdowns. That he is now ensnared in the machinery of the biomedical security state is predictable; this is today’s means by which regime enemies are punished and silenced.
It so happens that I heard Jordan speak in Budapest only months before the lockdowns that coincided with his own grave problem that he encountered with prescription medicine: as with many he was misled about what he believed was a simple medication. The timing was a tragedy because it took him out of the space of public intellectual life right when we needed him most: during the early months of lockdowns.
His voice went silent during these times. It was heartbreaking. The very small resistance continued despite his incapacitation. Once he got better, he gradually became aware of what had taken place and then became ferocious, as any thinking person must. Thus his current issues with the authorities.
Looking back at this date, it seems almost like he saw what was coming. In those months before lockdowns, I wrote the following report on what I saw in Budapest.
* * * * *
Almost from the first words of his outdoor lecture in Budapest, Hungary, held in the courtyard of the St. Stephen’s Basilica, Jordan Peterson’s eyes teared up and his voice cracked with emotion. Not just once. It happened repeatedly. His eyes never entirely dried. The audience could see it all because of the cameras and the huge monitors that made him some 25 times life-size, which is pretty apropos to his status as an intellectual in this part of the world. Indeed, in most parts of the world.
Tonight was interesting, however, because his tears were clearly not performative in any sense. It was a show of extreme vulnerability that he surely hoped that he would not show. He strikes me as a deeply emotional person – a temperamental cryer – who has probably practiced a lifetime to stop this.
It didn’t work this time. Before long, during his impassioned presentation on behalf of the dignity of every individual and the responsibility of living a life of truth, audience members too were tearing up in the midst of the awesome silence that fell over this massive crowd during the hour-long presentation.
He never quite got around to explaining his emotion. I think I can, however. So here is my go at it.
The first issue had to do with his introduction in this hugely dramatic space, which was filled with flares and fanfare and oceans of love from those who gathered, not just people with tickets (which were hard to get) but an equal number behind the barricades, extending as far back as one could see. It was impossible not to view this as a show of incredible affection for the man, his work, his influence, his personal courage, and his message. The crowds and the anticipation were overwhelming.
Now, if you are Peterson, you would have to contrast this scene with the raging nonsense you will read about yourself in the mainstream press, to say nothing of the academic literature along with various left-wing hit sites out there who routinely twist anyone’s words to confirm their wild narratives. His every word is picked apart, his footnotes followed, his analogies deconstructed in an unending game of gotcha in order to put him into some kind of predefined political category for easy dismissal.
For the easily led, he is a target. For the witch hunters in media and academia, he is a convenient scapegoat. Within the academy, he is the object of unrelenting envy. In the face of all this, including campus protests and media hectoring, he has been steadfast and brave, refusing to be intimidated and instead using the attention to get his message out there. To cut through all this nonsense, and like and appreciate him in any case, already marks you as being in possession of a discerning mind, a rebel against conventional wisdom. Apparently, there is no shortage of such rebels.
The crowds – I don’t have an estimate but there were 20,000 people at the Brain Bar event at which he was a main draw – might have seemed to him as a tribute to the resiliency of the human spirit. That people were there at all, seeking not a confirmation of political bias but rather to gain a greater sense of personal purpose, shows that the powerful in this world cannot finally rule the day.
He is just one man with a message against the world’s most powerful voices in media, academia, and government – and yet through ideas alone, beginning as nothing but one man in a classroom, he has become the world’s most influential public intellectual.
As for his emotion this night, Jordan probably felt a deep sense of gratitude for being the recipient of this affection and for his place in inspiring people to become intellectual dissidents. That is enough to cause tears of gratitude.
There is far more that overwhelms you about being in this remarkable and indescribably beautiful city. The history is deep and rich and present everywhere you look. There is drama within eyesight of anywhere you stand. The Danube river and bridges, the castles, the stunning Parliament building, the churches and universities, all of it, are not dusty old monuments but currently in use amidst a teeming commercial life that is equal parts old and new.
The whole city also feels extremely young, similarly today to what it might have been like in the late 19th century, in the last years of the Belle Époque when Budapest’s cultural and commercial life rivaled Vienna’s. It’s a magical place, as delightful to visit as anywhere on the planet, in my view.
But what you see is only on the surface. The scars of this city are extremely deep, having been put through astonishing traumas of totalitarianism of the left and right, the bombings, the terror and cruelty and poverty – the experience is not that far back in history. It was tyrannized by Soviet occupation twice, first after World War I and then following World War II, between which it experienced Nazi occupation and devastating Allied bombing that destroyed its infrastructure (all of which has since been rebuilt).
And yet you can walk the city and not see this deep suffering overtly. The city, which wears this grim past lightly, is a tribute to the survival of hope in the face of overwhelming forces that sought to destroy it. The city lives. It thrives. It dreams anew.
In addition to being a psychologist, Peterson is also a historian of totalitarianism. There are ways to read history as a dry reportage of events. That is not how he reads history. Good historians recount events. Great historians tell stories as if they lived them. Peterson is next level: he has sought the inner philosophical and psychological turmoil that shape history through the moral choices of both the oppressed and oppressors. He seeks to understand the inner horror from the point of view of human nature.
As he exclaimed in a slightly terrifying moment, he has read about the history of Hungary and totalitarianism “not as a victim, not as a hero, but as a perpetrator.” What he means is that we must come to terms with evil not just as something external to ourselves but as a force deep within the human personality itself – not excluding our own personalities. What character traits do we need to acquire, what values do we need to adopt, that can prepare us to resist when evil invites our participation in violence and terror? He never stops reminding us what we are capable of doing both good and evil, and urges that we steel ourselves to live good lives even when it is not in our political and economic interests to do so.
So here we were in St Stephen’s square outside the great Basilica, packed with young people there to hear his message, in this remarkable city, a tribute to the resiliency of the human personality in the presence of one hundred years of oppression and violence. And yet there we were in this year, an age of hope, everyone given yet another chance to get it right, to live well, to treat others with dignity, to build peace and prosperity yet again.
The look on his face, and tears in his eyes, seem to suggest to himself and others: we can do this. We will not give in to evil. We can be strong. We can learn, build, and achieve. Against all odds, he has emerged as a leading voice to add to the possibility of success in our times.
I’ve heard Peterson live before and, like you, watched many of his speeches and interviews on youtube. I can tell you, I’ve never heard anything like what he said on this evening. It was for the ages.
The latter part of his presentation was lighter, with some very charming “one-minute therapy” sessions on stage with audience members that variously turned profound once again. And here is what is amazing: you discover that the real core of Peterson is not his political outlook or his role as a cultural pundit, historian, or philosopher but his professional training as a psychotherapist, just one man there to help one individual find a way forward through the terrifying struggles of life. Through technology, he finds himself in the blessed role of serving millions of willing readers and listeners.
Even now he can’t possibly know the full impact of his influence. I suspect, for example, that he is unaware of the crucial role he played in American political life when only two years ago, young men were being drawn to the invidious politics of the so-called Alt-right as an alternative to the false moralism of the social-justice left. They were drawn to his brave stances against speech controls, but he knew better than to side with any mob on either side of the extremes. He schooled even his new fans in the evils of every brand of identity politics – and the moral urgency of universal human dignity – and justly earned the wrath of alt-right leadership. Thus did he contribute to saving a generation from perdition in extremely volatile times. For this, he deserves the gratitude of every genuine liberal, but, so far as I know, he has never been publicly credited for this achievement.
“Ego Sum Via Veritas et Vita,” read the sign above the entrance to the Basilica. I am the way, the truth, and the life. The sign reminds us of the universal hunger to find direction, purpose, meaning, and redemption in the midst of the chaos and anomy of the historical narrative.
Peterson is not a religious man but he respects its ethos and contribution. This night he became a preacher of goodness, of civility, of moral strength in the face of struggle. The poetry of it all, and the promise that goodness and decency can prevail, was manifest in the crowds and the city right here, this night, in Budapest. It combined to inspire him to find the fullness of his voice.
And this is why he cried tears of joy.
* * * *
Soon after this presentation, Peterson was in the hospital in recovery at the same time the world of freedom and rights fell apart. He woke to a different world. He began to fight again. And here we are, exactly as he predicted: he is the enemy of the state. He has spent his entire professional career not only as a scholar and therapist – really a genius – but also as a resistor and a bringer of light in dark times.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
Author
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