by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-04-28 11:41:12+00:00
> we are coming out of a decade of cancel culture on campuses

You should read your own article. A drunk dude kissed a girl without asking, and his friends thought that was kinda shit an uninvited him to a christmas party. That is the cancel culture that is "silencing" people?

Nigel Farage is on TV day in and day out lying about things but one white dude from Oxford uni got univited to a christmas dinner...

> Elon Musk was clearly radicalized by it,

No he wasn't. There are plenty of theories about Elon Musk descent but none of them stem from any real pushback against cancel culture. His image began being tarnished with him calling a dude who saved some kids a pe do over not using his submarine. When he bought Twitter he made the point he wasn't gonna change much etc, 3 months after purchasing it he said he was not interested in politics and would not donate to any candidate, then he donated 400 million to Donald Trump's campaign.

Whether you wanna go down the route that his daughter being trans affected him, his friendship with epstein and Maxwell, his open ketamine use, or his ties to Russia (such as allowing Russia to use starlink, or cutting Ukraine off in parts of the conflict) its hard to know when and were he went from "i love the lgbt, green energy and im iron man" to "im gonna retweet neo nazis talking about replacement theory". But it has nothing to do with cancel culture.

> Jordan Peterson's fame was partly due to him standing up in front of the obligation to use various pronouns at work, with the threat of getting fired.[1]

That is not true. The law in Canada did not even say that. He was famous because post Obama the number of conservative causes was dwindiling and a number of think tanks found trans issues to be a perfect powder keg (they use similar reasoning Nazi's did when they burned trans research in the 30s). Its small, polirising, nuanced and most people have never seen or interacted with trans people or issues. It has a great ability to mold the talking points without any input from the actual people being discussed (its the same issue they love Fetuses and pregnant women, you can say anything without the fetus ever contradicting you).

In this push of think tanks he was used as a standard bearer, and given way more attention and money than any of his points ever deserved. The anti feminist videos on youtube, and a man on a suit disucissing against overly emotional 18 year olds became an entire genre of bad faith arguments (on both sides of the aisle, there are now plenty of "owning trump voters" content).

He then wrote a book about doing your bed, some insanely inacurate attempts at jungian psychology to impress 15 year olds and the money to push his videos on youtube did the rest.

The reality of a figure like Peterson is that he is a very flawed, and intellectually limited individual. His work on semiotics is super interesting but outside of his niche field he is clearly out of depth. His own personal failings, despite humanising him, make for a tragic figure when you realise many young men who are lost look up to him.

I have 0 issue with someone promoting some version of neo stoicism and how being a man should be, but when you get addicted to benzos and fly to russia to give yourself permanent brain damage because you are too much of a wuss to survive the withdrawl symptons then you should drop your philosphy because it clearly does not work.