The Devil and His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler, Volume One

By Troy Parfitt

It might sound implausible—even preposterous—but the world's foremost public intellectual is a Nazi and an occultist.

 

The Devil and His Due chronicles how an obscure professor obsessed with the subject of evil rebranded himself as a pop-psych guru and shot to stardom by combatting "Marxist" compelled-speech laws that never existed. It illustrates how Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, father figure to a legion of male followers, is a cult leader who identifies as "the saviour," feigns Christian beliefs, glorifies Satan, networks with white supremacists, praises serial killers, discusses "the Jewish question," touts banned substances as "miracle cures," encourages converts to slaughter goats in backyard sacrifices that ought to be "sufficiently bloody," and teaches that the alt-right project is "incomplete."

 

Peterson has spent 35 years pretending to warn against fascism while gushing about Hitler's boundless talents and channelling his speech. Undeniably, the lecturer's 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning have been systematically plagiarized from volumes like Mein Kampf and Hitler's Second Book. Troy Parfitt has documented over 4,000 examples of Jordan Peterson copying from Adolf Hitler and others, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and the necromancer Aleister Crowley, who believed the Führer to be "a prophet" and lobbied to have his satanic religion made the official faith of the Third Reich.

 

Parfitt exposes Peterson's hidden identity, academic theft, and latent belief system. He decodes his crypto-fascist messages and tells the mesmerizing, bizarre, and entirely true story of an elaborate prank—a ghastly joke born out of vengeance and psychosis, and perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting people.

 

The Devil and His Due is a public warning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troy Parfitt
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393449430

Book preview

Prologue

Pleased to Meet You

When I first heard Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speak in September 2017, I thought he had the personality of a dictator. When I first read Mein Kampf in September 2018, I realized he was a Nazi. Before I authenticate this claim, permit me to share how I arrived at such a discovery.

Initially, Professor Peterson reminded me of a high school teacher I had in Canada who bypassed the subject of history and made straight for the domain of religious sermonizing. One of my instructor’s dicta was study and pray, and he was forever waffling on about the importance of responsibility. That educator wasted my time, never asking for feedback and often concealing his dearth of knowledge and archaic methodology behind a veneer of Christian certainty. He was a fusty authoritarian, and I—even then—a skeptical democrat, so friendship was out of the question. He engendered deep feelings of distrust, similar to intuitions that flowered darkly when I listened to Jordan Peterson. As Peterson’s star rose, I became increasingly suspicious of the man with all the answers. But then, I knew that even the sturdiest of answers could collapse when placed among questions.

Why did Peterson, a clinical psychologist, spend so much time going on about God without conceptualizing God? And why did he talk about God at all? Couldn’t we just move beyond this whole divinity business? Why did he say he was Christian, non-Christian, or didn’t appreciate or understand the question—depending on who asked? He didn’t act like a Christian, even by the abysmally low standards of many Christians. In fact, he described himself as a fundamentally bad person with a crazy brain who was full of snakes and mischief and believed in the Devil before he believed in God. If that was so, why did he lecture on the Bible, quote scripture, and say he acted as though God existed? And how did his affirmational declarations square with his pronouncements that Christianity was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious? Why did he write that the resurrection of Christ was preposterous, only to concede that it might have happened, but in order to be sure, he’d need to think about it for 40 years? Why did he somberly declare on stage, at age 56, that the moment he began taking life seriously was when he came home from a party in a drunken rage and sketched Jesus on the cross wrapped in a snake?

Why did Peterson boast about teaching at Harvard (1993–1998) and then say in a fury that he hoped Harvard would get sued for fiddling with student applications for reasons concerning race? Why did he heatedly insist he had no far-right followers, but then admit that he had them in droves and knew they were anti-Semitic? How come he said that agoraphobia used to be defined as the fear of open spaces, but was now considered the fear of being away from… figures of authority? What was with his claims to be conservative, liberal, a classical liberal, apolitical, and post-ideological? How was it possible for an academic to say they were apolitical and post-ideological given that academics are well aware that all human utterances are ideological expressions of power and politics?

Why did the psychology professor grandiosely identify to his students—above all, and with the aid of an elaborate diagram—as an exploratory hero? Did this have anything to do with the fact that, as a grown man, he used to wear a cape? Why did he identify as an exploratory hero while slamming so-called identity politics? Why did he fail to cite the journal articles and monographs that held the findings he maintained were absolutely final? And how could anyone submit that academic findings were final, let alone incontestable, especially if they were an academic? Journal articles contain sections on limitations and suggestions-for-further-research. Academic investigation is a continual exploratory process, something one might know if they were a full professor at the University of Toronto.

What was with all the hollering, seething, glaring, dictum-issuing, and fist-clenching? Why did Peterson command people not to think, but listen, notice, and pay attention? Did he fancy himself a hypnotist? Was that the reason he liked to talk about magic? Did this explain his fondness for exclaiming poof like a magician says presto? Why did he have an enemies list a mile long? And why did he constantly encourage his followers to loathe the entries on that burgeoning scroll? Was he adhering to a tenet of Christianity?

What was with the puerile criticisms of women (for wearing makeup in the workplace), gay men (by calling them promiscuous, referring to their peculiarity, and linking them to AIDS), transgender people (by labelling them gender benders and a side show), and other folks who identified with the LGBTQ+ community, which he called a parody?

Peterson became famous for opposing Canada’s compelled-speech laws, but why was it that no one—including him—could locate these laws? How could he allege that legislation forcing people to make specific utterances was currently in effect—or would be soon? Why did he maintain, before members of the Canadian Senate, that citizens would have to employ pronouns like ze and zir, when the bill he was challenging made no mention of pronouns like ze and zir? And when asked by a senator to provide other pronouns he said people would be legally bound to use, why did he answer, Well, I have a very bad memory for that sort of thing, but if you’re interested in it, you can find lists very rapidly on the web? Why did he contend that he would be forced to use words that could be found somewhere online, but specify that they were words no one either knows or uses? And why did he say that Canadians would be compelled to utter these unknown words due to the reprehensible government and its Marxist element? Why, moments later, did his lawyer concede that the legislation does not seem to imply any manner of compelled speech and then intimate that in the future it might? And given this admission, how come Peterson went on to tell the public that compelled-speech laws were currently on the books, or would be, and that their (pending) passage was the upshot of a Communist plot? Why did he appear on The Joe Rogan Experience and inform Americans that Canadians were already compelled to use [prescribed speech], as were Americans, especially New Yorkers, although people don’t know it yet? Why did he say that compelled speech laws had made it illegal to be a biologist? And for what reason did he wield a megaphone at the University of Toronto to advocate free speech, only to say later in class: The thing about free speech is that, like, I’m not a free speech advocate, let’s say?

The legislation in question was Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act which made it illegal to deny employment to or discriminate against people based on their gender identity or expression. Did Peterson have something against human rights? Also, the law had been on the books at the provincial level for years, so why was he only opposing it now? And why was no one else doing so?

In addition to Peterson’s scorn for the legal protection of a vulnerable group, why did he caustically deride educators? Why did he urge parents to remove their children from school, say that the humanities had become inhumane, brand universities snake pits, and call teachers fucking pricks? What kind of educator would tauntingly label his peers cowards? One who considered himself a hero? I wondered if Peterson’s cape featured the emblem of a shield emblazoned with the letters EH.

How could a PhD holder splenetically assert that social constructionism was wrong, dangerous, and disproven while advising his students and followers to read (or socially construct their views with) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? If social constructionism was meritless, why was he so disquieted about students being socially constructed with democratic values? Or how did he know that Dostoevsky’s novel was any good, or even what it was about? And why, 20 years earlier, had he lectured: mostly what you are is… a culturally constructed entity, most of which has been constructed using the mediation of language? How come he had written a representation is a social construct? Had his views been socially reconstructed? If so, why?

Just which variety of academic would say on stage that the Enlightenment was important, yet acidly opine during an interview in his home that it was nothing? Why did he disparage Richard Dawkins for being an Enlightenment guy yet claim to be an Enlightenment guy? How could someone dismiss the Enlightenment, proclaim that liberals were destroying tenets of the Enlightenment, and identify as a classical liberal? Classical liberalism was predicated on the beliefs of people like John Locke and Adam Smith, architects of the Enlightenment.

What sort of professor would contend that 80 percent of humanities papers contained zero citations without citing this claim? What kind of papers? Where and by who were they published? And where was the evidence to support his accusation that 20 percent of university lecturers were Marxists? Why did he say that these modern-day Marxists were murderous and genocidal and affiliated with indoctrination cults?

Such extreme language, and details were habitually omitted, yet hardly anyone seemed to offer the doctor a challenge, let alone tell him to take his tablets. Mind you, anyone who did ask pesky questions risked being upbraided, badmouthed, or finding themselves on the receiving end of a well-practised, homicidal glare—especially if they were women.

Carrying on, how could an academic say that the majority of academics, infected as they were by postmodernism, forbade logic, debate, and discussion? What did that even mean? Which academics? Where and how? And how could liberal educators asking students to consider sociocultural theory or power relations lead to the type of atrocities committed by Pol Pot?

Speaking of atrocities, why did Peterson say that Stalin killed 20, 30, 35, and 60 million people? How was it that the Nazis could have murdered 6 and 7 million Jews? Why did he say—in the span of seconds—that Mao, in The Great Leap Forward alone, eliminated 40 million, 100 million, and it didn’t matter how many million? And how did such inconsistencies intersect with his submission: I’ve read everything I can get my hands on in the development of authoritarian political systems, and I know the literature inside out and backwards? How could a psychologist allege to be a specialist in authoritarianism, twentieth-century history, environmental studies, and evolutionary biology? Did he hold degrees he was keeping secret?

And if Peterson was really as clever as he was forever reminding us (he’s a smart person, skipped grade one, has intellectual power and an IQ in excess of 150), why did he endlessly trip over basic grammar, opting for stoled over stole and more better instead of better? (Anyone can mangle language, but few do it while bragging about being gifted.) Why did his website say he’d had the honour of writing the forward (as in: forward march) to a new edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago? And why did he consistently misuse the prefix meta, for instance in the case of metafish, which I assume means a fish about a fish, but that makes no sense and he was talking about a whale. And what did he mean by metasnake? Was that some heavy metal band?

Why did the doctor extol the reliability of magic mushrooms or label hallucinogens amazing? Why did he moodily insist that the sole way to quit smoking was to have a mystical experience induced by psilocybin? Why did he publish a psychedelic video promoting psilocybin, ayahuasca (DMT), and ecstasy (MDMA), which he falsely claimed had a 72 percent cure rate for PTSD? Why did he call these drugs miracle cures and the food of the gods while omitting that they were banned substances that could cause paranoia, anxiety, psychosis, and death? Why did he recurrently endorse cocaine, for example by calling it fun and enjoyable, and suggesting to his students that they should be nose-deep in that stuff non-stop? Why did he admit to taking illicit drugs and intimate they had helped him commune with God the Father? Was he communing with God the Father when he stole glances toward the heavens? And just who was this God the Father?

Why did Peterson bash feminists for maintaining there was something called the patriarchy even though he endorsed the patriarchy? Why was he resolute that group identity was appalling, yet vital for developing individual identity? How did he expect anyone to believe that a few sips of apple cider had kept him awake for 600 hours straight? Why did he tell an interviewer that he had read 200 books on the environment only to conclude it was fine? And if it was fine, why did he say to his students: There’s gonna be some extinctions. We’re eating up the ocean like, ya know, some insane piranha? What made him declare he had special abilities, predicated on his credentials, to ascertain whether someone was lying? Was he saying he had magical powers? Poof! Once more, I thought of the cape.

After listening to Peterson for hundreds of hours, I concluded that he was staggeringly dishonest and freakishly weird. What I also found strange, and worrying, at least in the moments I believed I could decipher his speech, was that he and I appeared to have shared interests. I had also read Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. Additionally, I was a student of history and had a basic grounding in Nazism and Communism. However, whereas I (and countless others) had read fairly widely on these movements, Peterson’s reading selection seemed minuscule or largely undeclared. To give the Devil his due, he said his interest in the travesties of the past was not historical, but psychological—only, I wondered whether psychological meant psychopathic.

***

I say this, because on top of bungling and fabricating basic historical data, Peterson’s interest in totalitarianism seemed to manifest itself primarily in the transformation required for normal people to degenerate into robotic murderers for race or state. Indeed, he shone a light on this ghoulish fixation whenever he tried to convince people to read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Ordinary Men is about Unit 101 of Hitler’s Order Police, a battalion of ostensibly regular, middle-aged men who deteriorated into depraved butchers while (to quote Peterson) they were in Poland establishing order. Eichmann in Jerusalem paints a distressing portrait of Adolf Eichmann, the dim and seemingly mundane Nazi technocrat who oversaw the Final Solution. Peterson has characterized Eichmann as a faceless bureaucrat who would have worked in any bureaucracy. Granted, he was the architect of the Final Solution in many ways [but] in no way a psychopath. On the contrary, he was the sorta guy who had his mum do his laundry when he went off to the army.

I found this intriguing, because after Eichmann was captured, he conceded, Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. However, they did mean something to him, because he also said, I must say, truthfully, that if we had killed all ten million Jews that Himmler’s statistician had listed in 1933, I would say, ‘Good, we have destroyed an enemy.’  Moreover, Eichmann said that to distract himself from the unpleasantness of orchestrating genocide, he would utter a declaration of faith known as the Old Roman Symbol, which begins I believe in God the Father…

If Peterson’s chief psychological interest in Nazism was the transformation of ordinary citizens into unthinking mass-murderers, his preoccupation with Communism mostly involved the fine details of Stalin’s brutality and the hellish conditions in Russian forced-labour camps. As for other aspects of Marxism-Leninism, especially outside the Soviet Union, his knowledge seemed fleeting. Although he hinted at being troubled by the horrors of Mao’s China, he had apparently digested just two books about China: Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962, which I’ve never heard him mention (it’s on his recommended-reading list), and Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which I have heard him mention, but which has little to do with Communist China. Nanking is a graphic examination of atrocities committed by the Japanese Army against Chinese civilians in 1937 and 1938, when Mao and his Reds were on the lam and the Republic of China was governed by the Nationalist dictator, Chiang Kai-shek.

Everyone has their own approach to history. One of mine is to start with broad overviews before identifying more specific areas of interest and drilling down. Peterson’s technique was to go straight for the gore. However, it wasn’t bloody battles that drew his interest, but the ritualized mass-slaughter of unarmed or imprisoned civilians. He found the idea of the powerful engaging in the systemic torture and extermination of the powerless mesmerizing. He was into the persecution and slaughter of innocents.

This struck me as curious until I discovered an older video where he informed an audience of academics that his life-long fascination had been with evil. Not preventing or warning people about participating in evil, nor with an empathetic view toward the victims of evil acts, but the desire to do harm for the sake of harm. Or to quote his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, the human capacity for evil for the sake of evil.

***

These days, Peterson says that his objectives are helping people embrace personal responsibility and remain alert to the re-emergence of fascism and communism. However, these aims are unrelated, and Western communism is practically non-existent. What’s more, he continuously discloses that his true interest is his old interest: evil for evil’s sake, most evident in his tireless fascination with Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity and their attendant cults of personality. When it comes to Communist states besides Stalin’s, he doesn’t much care. And with regard to fascist movements other than the Third Reich, he says almost nothing.

However, the good doctor has routinely spoken about Satan, though not in ways cautionary or Christian-like. And instead of recommending broad histories about Nazism or Communism, he has suggested people read Milton’s Paradise Lost (about Satan), Goethe’s Faust (starring Mephistopheles), Dante’s Inferno, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (which mentions the Devil over 100 times), Dostoevsky’s Demons (sometimes called The Devils or The Possessed), James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (because of its meticulous description of hell), and Nietzsche’s Antichrist. He has also read and recommended Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics by Elaine Pagels, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Roméo Dallaire (about genocide and satanic possession), Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (about adults who imbued children with false memories of sexual abuse), Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World by Jeffrey Burton Russel, and The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity also by Russel, which Peterson enjoyed, because it dwelt on the embodiment of the ideas of evil. As for Goethe, Milton, and Dante, he says he read them to understand how we nearly achieved nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War, instead of reading about the Cold War.

Peterson still speaks of the Devil and laces his language with hell, damn, evil, bloody, and doomed, along with his patented entreaty to give the Devil his due. However, at some point he decided to trim back on identifying as someone obsessed with evil and rebrand himself as a global citizen and self-help guru anxious about the return of fascism—yet he spends a lot of his time assailing the centre and left, impersonating Joseph McCarthy, castigating Western democracies, and displaying elation for the rise of the far right. He has also signalled repeatedly to white nationalists that he’s their man.

Intrinsic to Peterson’s updated identification and empty, existential warnings is the claim that he wants the best for people. On The Dr. Oz Show, that’s how he said he’d like to be remembered: as someone who wanted the best for people. But if sincere, why has he also said that people should discard their childish and dangerous empathy (Eichmann: Repentance is something for little children), or that if they wanted to destroy themselves on drugs, that was fine so long as it didn’t affect him? And why did he say to Dr. Oz that he wanted to be remembered as someone who wanted the best for people, but then say to Helen Lewis from British GQ that he hoped to be remembered as someone honest, mere moments after admitting he was prone to lying?

Concerning the psychologist’s call to jettison empathy, when discussing Ordinary Men, he has identified, sympathized with, and expressed admiration for the Order Police while glossing over the grisly fate of their Jewish victims. In class, he irately told his students to read about the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrators and forget about the victims, meaning: forget about the Jews. And when lecturing on psychopathic narcissists and how they deceive people, he cracked jokes about one of Canada’s most notorious criminals, a serial rapist and serial murderer named Paul Bernardo, who brutally raped thirteen young women and killed three, one of whom he strangled to death and cut up into ten pieces. The girl was 14, her name was Leslie Mahaffy, and she begged for her life. Do you see why Peterson would find Bernardo’s crimes amusing?

Peterson heaped praise on Bernardo for what he judged to be a masterful performance during a post-sentencing interrogation wherein he lied to, criticized, and mocked investigators. The professor compared the killer to the CEO of a meeting who was giving his employees hell for not being up to scratch. He called his theatrics lovely, brilliant, enlightening, and amazing, adding, Wow, it’s just mind-boggling. He’s just so good at what he does. And he’s good looking and he’s charismatic and, you know, he can really pull it off. Note how Peterson said this using the present tense in a video he published in 2017, yet Bernardo was questioned in prison in 2007, having been convicted in 1995. For Peterson, Bernardo’s delinquency seemed very much present and alive—nay, inspirational. Accordingly, I remained deeply suspicious about the world’s foremost public intellectual, but lacked the evidence to put pen to paper.

***

I picked up the scent again while watching a boring debate about ontology between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. With searing intensity, Peterson conceded that he had known for decades that working as a guard at Auschwitz would have made him feel deeply satisfied and engendered happiness. Again, this was a realization he’d had for decades, overlapping with the decades in which he had obsessed over evil, which he said he had studied probably… my whole life.

Happiness? Peterson seldom seemed happy, and happiness (like empathy) was a feeling he counselled against. I knew that he liked to convince his students that they would have readily complied had they been Auschwitz guards, but suddenly this thought experiment took on another dimension. Slow on the uptake, I finally realized that Dr. Peterson’s spaceship sailed well beyond the orbit of the eminently disturbed and deep into the ether of the irretrievably deranged.

In a video called Why Hitler Bathed Even More Than You Think, Professor Peterson mimicked goose-stepping, which he described to his students as troops imitating the dictator in an absolutely perfect way. He characterized order in the Third Reich in ways suspiciously akin to the order in his dominance-hierarchy theory. He even air-drew Hitler’s domain of order or Aryan box in the shape of a square, like how he air-drew his dominance hierarchy in the shape of a triangle. He submitted that since Hitler was disgust sensitive, what lay outside the Aryan box was parasites and predators. He has also said, I’m rather disgust sensitive, and in his lecture, Campus Indoctrination: The Parasitization of Myth, he compared liberal educators to communist parasites, revealing that what lay outside his dominance hierarchy represented a threat.

After goose-stepping, Peterson conjectured that Hitler didn’t fear Jews, but found them disgusting. Disgust was the theoretical lens through which we ought to view the impetus for the Holocaust. Hitler bathed four times a day, Peterson continued, and I thought of a certain academic who liked to tell people to clean up their rooms and clean up their act. And he was also an admirer of willpower so he could stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car. When Peterson said, like this, he gave the Nazi salute.

Many people would explain this away, but many people explained Hitler away and still do. For me, it was clear that Peterson was adulating and identifying with Hitler and that he could relate to his disgust for the Jews. And this is how it goes. When Peterson appears to be talking about someone else, he’s often referring to himself. With Peterson, it’s nearly always about Peterson. When he spoke of Paul Bernardo’s masterful performance, he was simultaneously alluding to his own masterful performance: his talent for making people believe that he’s concerned about them, when his genuine pursuit is the one he outlined before morphing into a self-esteem coach who teaches his followers to become individuals and exude strength. And through his veiled self-descriptions, he perennially divulges how and by who his views have been socially constructed, and it’s not from any virtuous biblical figures. Quite the opposite.

During the hygienic-Hitler lecture, Peterson explained how the authoritarian first cleaned up factories and their bugs and… rats before cleaning up the asylums and finally the Jews. In 2014 Personality Lecture 20: Conscientiousness (Biology & Traits), I found more of the same: goose-stepping, modelling the Sieg Heil while commending Hitler’s willpower, saying how the Nazis decided to clean up the mental asylums, which seemed to go pretty well and was part of the logical progression in the mass murder of people Peterson called useless and compared to rats. In the psychotherapist’s other videos, he has likened people to baboons, bats, beasts of burden, "chickens (who peck each other to death), chimps, cockroaches, herd creatures, monsters, pack animals, predators, scorpions, scum rat[s], snakes, spiders, rabbit[s], weasel[s] (who he’d like to slap), wolves, worms, and varmint[s] (a variation of vermin)." And instead of other public intellectuals distancing themselves from Peterson for using such language, notables like Steven Pinker, Slavoj Žižek, and Stephen Fry have queued up to be seen with the Canadian sensation, who has also been warmly received at Oxford.

Peterson’s videos about the Third Reich’s expanding clean-up campaign yielded similar videos, including one where Peterson said that the Führer brought order to Europe, but a little too much order. You see, in the 1920s and ‘30s, Hitler had been concerned with all the chaos, hence the need for order. Of course, just which ethnic group Hitler blamed for the chaos and how he created order is common knowledge. And it’s becoming common knowledge that Peterson’s dominance hierarchy features two opposing forces: order and chaos.

I found extended criticism of Communism, but denunciation of Nazism was shallow and offset or superseded by veneration, defence, and sympathy for the movement’s leader. Peterson eschewed compassion, but for Hitler he made an exception.

During a conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience with biologist Bret Weinstein, the host said he wanted to discuss the Nazi tyrant, but Peterson expressed reluctance, citing that he might say something stupid. However, after Weinstein proffered that Hitler’s attempt to enlarge the Reich and eliminate the Other could be understood from a biological perspective, but that his comprehension of biology and racial theory were hare-brained, Peterson blew a fuse.

Peterson: "I’ve studied Hitler a lot and there’s a bunch of things that you can’t say about him. You can’t say he was stupid. You can’t say he was without artistic talent. You can’t say that he was a poor organizer. You can’t say that he wasn’t charismatic. You can’t say that he [didn’t do] wonders for Germany’s economy in the first part of his reign. And… so… it’s very necessary if you’re dealing intelligently with a true monster that you give the Devil his due."

Weinstein: Yeah, so I think the thing that I saw in your video was, your argument was when he was losing, instead of putting the genocide on pause and, uh…

Peterson: Winning. Winning the war.

Weinstein: And winning, that he ratcheted up the genocide.

Peterson: "Yeah, I don’t know if it’d really be, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say it was him who did that, although I think he had a hand in it. It does appear to me to be that’s what happened."

Did you catch the word charismatic? And do you recall who else Peterson described as charismatic? Paul Bernardo, whose lies to the police were masterful. You may have also noticed the downgrading of Hitler’s role in the Final Solution, similar to the minimizing of Eichmann’s role. And then there was the pugnacity: Hitler merely had a hand in the uptick in butchery. The decision to accelerate the liquidation was taken by someone else, though presumably not Eichmann, because he was just a mama’s boy. Moreover, did you notice Peterson’s references to or sympathy for the victims, descriptions and criticisms of Hitler’s crimes, warnings about the dangers of (would-be) totalitarians, condemnations of far-right political leaders or white nationalists, cautions against the risks of dehumanizing people through discriminatory language, or instructions on how to safeguard democracy so that twentieth-century barbarity never happens again? No, me neither.

Examples of Peterson providing Hitler and company with sanctuary, typically through commendation and apologia, exceed one hundred. Instances of him identifying as a National Socialist number in the thousands. As Jung said, and as Peterson would agree, we are born a pattern. Peterson is a rigid pattern and admits to being singular in pursuing his objectives. One objective is to persuade his students to embody the success-determining trait of conscientiousness, which can be divided into orderliness and industriousness. This is noteworthy, because he has equated consciousness (a stand-in for conscientiousness) with evil, and said that orderliness is a good predictor of right-wing views. He has also linked orderliness to Nazi order, and argued that Hitler achieved success via order and industrialization. Just a coincidence, some might say. But, no, it isn’t. Peterson’s singularity of mind ensures that nothing he produces is a coincidence. Besides, how many coincidences are required before we establish a Jungian pattern—or archetype?

***

The University of Toronto’s exploratory hero also claims to be artistic, which is significant because he has lauded Hitler for winning a medal for bravery and exhibiting a very powerfully developed aesthetic sense. Hitler’s aesthetic sense was so potent that he "spent a lot of his time designing the cities that would be built after World War II… and those cities were generally conceptualized by him as places where the arts, or at least the Nazi version of the arts, could flourish."

With respect to the brave and artistic man’s public rallies, he was absolutely compelling and a very powerful, emotional orator, who had the requisite charisma to become the embodiment of the dark desire of the mob. Hitler was also a master organizer who came to embody the desire of the German people for order and revenge [against all the chaos] and he… embodied that fully. I wondered if Hitler’s embodiment of the dark desire of the mob had anything to do with the embodiment of the ideas of evil that Peterson was so besotted by in The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Hitler also appealed to the darkest fantasies of the crowd and he was really good at it, and he started to re-industrialize the economy and was actually pretty damned good at that. This was reminiscent of what Peterson said about Paul Bernardo’s lying: He’s just so good at what he does.

In another video, Peterson suggested that his students spare a thought for Hitler as a small lobster (description mine), not the big, compelling, multi-talented lobster we all fondly recall him as being today (lobsters being the metaphorical creatures that reside in Peterson’s representational dominance hierarchy, and the nickname for his followers). In a spiel akin to an inverted Remembrance Day ceremony, the lecturer reminded his class that World War I had been no cakewalk for the tender Austrian or the citizens of his adopted homeland. Germany suffered a humiliating defeat, followed by the unfair Treaty of Versailles, crippling hyperinflation, and the spectre of the Communist menace. I wondered if this Communist menace was affiliated with the Canadian government’s Communist plot or Marxist element.

Peterson also told a story about Hitler escaping an artillery barrage that left his comrades dead, saying that he must have thought, Maybe God has saved me for a higher purpose. I found quotes online from Hitler expounding on a State whose highest purpose is to preserve… our race… and asking, Who says I am not under the special protection of God? By the same token, I learned that this story about Hitler was created by Hitler and dismissed by historians as propaganda.

Peterson referred to Hitler as that guy, saying that he had read about that guy a lot, but as for which books, he only discussed two: Hitler’s Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy, and History by Richard A. Koenigsberg (brimful with delirious rants about Jews and disease, which Peterson has read out in class, saying, You can hardly read these things without being disgusted by them), and Hitler’s Table Talk (which he routinely comments on in public). Table Talk is a series of discombobulated monologues compiled mostly by Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann between 1941 and 1944. It’s difficult reading, a portal into the shattered mind of a genocidal maniac. But Peterson claimed he had read it twice, recommended it, and rated it amazing.

The number of Hitler biographies on Peterson’s recommended-reading list was zero, so I wondered why he had read about that guy a lot, let’s say, only to discuss two books by or about the Austrian mass-murderer who was amazing and charismatic, not to be confused with Paul Bernardo, the Canadian serial-murderer who was amazing and charismatic. Had Peterson read the other book by the man with all the charisma? If so, why did he almost never mention it?

***

Peterson has invoked Jung’s reference to performing a circumambulation around a phenomenon until you come to a deep understanding. Jung actually wrote about a circumambulation of the self that can achieve inner peace, but no matter. My deep understanding came when I read Mein Kampf and realized that Peterson was using it as an instruction manual and Satanic Bible—and I say this as an agnostic. Peterson’s spoken discourse was Hitler’s written discourse, but more contemporary and concise, with a different metre and register, and featuring references to psychology, Egyptology, Buddhism, Russian literature, and Harry Potter. Across a spectrum of topics, Hitler’s and Peterson’s beliefs were similar or practically identical.

The duo showed a remarkable overreliance on the same words: individual, responsibility, heroic, courage, greatness, strength, weakness, order, state, force, aim, power, fundamental, manifest, transform, nature, evil, sacrifice, etc. Utterances containing these words often had a notable degree of concurrence, were almost the same, or were exactly the same.

Hitler’s and Peterson’s language contained facile nods to antiquity, ornamental allusions to religion, venerating statements about our fair ancestors, reverence for the greatness of Western civilization, praise or encouragement for the working man, shopworn analogies of humans and animals, undercooked commentary on the roles of men, women, and children, poppycock about procreation and Social Darwinism, and the most plebeian rhetorical stratagems imaginable—all designed to petition aggrieved Aryans and loser lobsters, Peterson’s fans.

Hitler and Peterson appealed to feelings of vulnerability, resentment, betrayal, and torment before offering redemption: a cause predicated on individual responsibility (becoming a soldier), hard work (military training), strengthening oneself (more military training), bearing a burden (going to war to avenge defeat in the last war), aiming at things (Jews), confronting the terrible truth (that the Jews must die), doing one’s duty (slaying the Jews), reducing anxiety (murdering the Jews), mitigating the suffering (slaughtering the Jews), and all under the fantastical banner of God, Tradition, and Common Culture. Moreover, Hitler’s enemies list was a truncated version of Peterson’s: liberals, democrats, journalists, lawmakers, bureaucrats, educators, Marxists, cowards, weaklings, and women. Finding parallels between Peterson’s speech and Hitler’s writing was easy. Regarding the ideal soldier, Hitler talks about the importance of becoming comrades in arms and says:

"…on the self-consciousness of his own strength and on the basis of that esprit de corps which inspires him and his comrades, he must become convinced that he belongs to a people who are invincible."

And on why the Order Police transformed into mass murderers despite being told they could leave Poland and return to Germany, Peterson says:

"…the reason was, well, they were comrades, let’s say, in arms, you know, so they had that esprit de corps thing going and they were all thinking, ‘Well, I’m not gonna run away and leave my colleagues to do all the dirty work.’ It’s a war… and they have a duty…"

Now consider the following statements from Hitler in Mein Kampf and Peterson on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Hitler: The race that fails to come through the test will simply die.

Peterson: A culture that doesn’t hold the mother and child as sacred dies.

Hitler: People degenerate into an unthinking herd which could be reduced to total subjection.

Peterson: We’re more like herd animals, We’re pack animals, beasts of burden.

The following examples are from Mein Kampf and a University of Toronto lecture in which Peterson lauded Hitler’s oratory skills.

Hitler: An orator receives continuous guidance from the people before whom he speaks. This helps him to correct the direction of his speech; for he can always gauge, by the faces of his hearers, how far they follow and understand him, and whether his words are producing the desired effect.

Peterson: "A good speaker does a variety of things. One is that he never talks to the crowd per se. You know, you pick out specific individuals and talk to them and they’re sort of reflective of the crowd and then you can tell if everyone’s understanding. And another thing a good speaker does is pay attention to the damned responses of the crowd… You wanna stay in touch with the non-verbal communications. Now, Hitler, he’s kind of a chaotic guy, ya know? He’s very angry…"

I then bought Hitler’s Table Talk and learned that when Peterson stumped for the book in public, often mentioning Hitler’s spontaneous utterances and proclivity for orderliness (the trait he told his students was a good predictor of right-wing beliefs), he was channelling a passage where Hitler talks about bringing order to the Jews. You will see this and other Table Talk examples later, marked by (T). I found many more connections in Hitler’s Zweites Buch, or Second Book, an effort abandoned in 1928, because no one was buying Mein Kampf, published in 1925. Extracts from Zweites Buch are followed by (Z).

Hitler: Human birth control wipes out the bearer of the highest values (Z)

Peterson: What’s the highest value? Don’t underestimate the significance of the birth control pill. It’s like the hydrogen bomb…

Hitler, misquoting Goethe: Abortion, thou of filth and fire.

Peterson: Abortion is clearly wrong. I don’t think anyone debates that.

A central tenet of Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch is the stab in the back, the fabrication that the surrender of the Central Powers in 1918, along with Germany’s transition to a turbulent democracy, was due to a Jewish or Marxist conspiracy hatched by the November criminals. Compare the following spoken statements in which Hitler and Peterson link betrayal to being stabbed in the back. I will now designate speech with an (S).

Hitler: For us it was a filthy crime against the German people, a stab in the back of the German nation (S)

Peterson: if you betray [trust], it’s really, it’s like a… knife in the heart through the back. (S)

At the University of Toronto, Peterson has promoted the bogus and racist theory of the stab in the back.

Peterson: There was tremendous political upheaval in Germany during the 1920s as well. I wanna just set the stage for that. And… the hyperinflation wiped out all the people that were prudent and saved, and left them with a terrible sense that the entire system had betrayed them which is, of course, exactly what had happened.

Hitler: I intensely loathed the whole gang of miserable party politicians who had betrayed the people. I had long ago realized that the interests of the nation played only a very small part with this disreputable crew and that what counted for them was the possibility of filling their own empty pockets.

The dam burst when I got Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, and compared them to Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch, Hitler’s Table Talk, Adolf Hitler: Collection of Speeches 1922–1945, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims by Hermann Rauschning, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography by John Toland, the NSDAP 25-point manifesto by Anton Drexler (but announced by Adolf Hitler), Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Hitler and Me, a propaganda booklet by Dietrich Eckart, and Adolf Hitler: His Life and Speeches, another propaganda piece credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerber, but possibly commissioned and co-written by Hitler, which I found an extract of in Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi by Thomas Weber.

An analysis yielded countless instances of plagiarism, of which I’ve documented only about 3,100. Most are from Mein Kampf and the speeches, many from Zweites Buch, and a few from Table Talk, Hitler Speaks, Bolshevism, etc.

To restate, the copying revolves around Hitler’s pet words, sometimes used hundreds of times. Take force, which appears across Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch some 390 times or once every 2 pages, and in 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning 268 times or once every 3 pages, often within collocations or two-to-three-word textual-bundles inspired by Hitler. If the absolutist uses one of these bundles repeatedly or capitalizes one of his pet words (typically a common noun), the psychologist often follows suit. This is Peterson’s favourite and most basic plagiarization technique. I will now show you a sampling of this method before moving on to more elaborate strategies. Quotes from Maps are marked with an (M).

Hitler: moral force

Peterson: moral force

Hitler: powerful forces

Peterson: powerful forces

Hitler: social forces

Peterson: social forces (M)

Hitler: physical force

Peterson: physical force

Hitler: creative force

Peterson: creative force

Hitler: forced emigration (Z)

Peterson: forced migration

Hitler: brute force

Peterson: brute force (M)

Hitler: necessary force

Peterson: Necessary Force

Hitler: fundamental force

Peterson: fundamental forces (M)

Hitler: destructive forces

Peterson: destructive forces

Hitler: internal forces (S), divine force (S)

Peterson: internal forces (M), divine forces (M)

Hitler: full force (S), forced to retreat, opposing forces (S)

Peterson: full force (M), forced to retreat (M), opposing forces (M)

Hitler: the driving force

Peterson: the driving force (M)

Hitler: forced labor

Peterson: forced labor

Note the American spelling of labor. In all other instances in 12 Rules, Peterson uses labour. Again, there are hundreds of these collocations or two-to-three-word bundles, most of them common, many of them rare; and the number of books Peterson has is just two.

The professor also imitates larger chunks of text, usually of four to seven words.

Hitler: the highest aims of human existence

Peterson: the highest levels of human existence

Hitler: the highest achievements in all fields (Z)

Peterson: the highest of human achievements

Hitler: in the highest sense (Z), the highest good, the highest ideal

Peterson: in the highest sense, the highest good, the highest of ideals

Hitler: the very depths of his being

Peterson: the most profound depths of your Being.

Hitler: the strength of the State

Peterson: the strength of the state (M)

Hitler: the dead authority of a dead state

Peterson: Culture is always in a near-dead state

Hitler: memory of the dead past

Peterson: memories of the past

Hitler: the great heroes of our past (S)

Peterson: the great heroes of the past (M)

Hitler: the great spirit of the creative power of the past (S)

Peterson: the spirit of great people in the past

Hitler: the treasures of the past

Peterson: the treasures of the past (S)

Hitler: the glory of the past! (S)

Peterson: the glory of the past

Hitler: traditions of times past (S)

Peterson: traditions of the past (M)

Hitler: our most dim and distant past (S)

Peterson: the dimmest reaches of the past

Hitler: the dim mist of a thousand years.

Peterson: the dim mists of time.

Hitler: mistakes which led to downfall in the past (S)

Peterson: mistakes they made knowingly in the past

Hitler: knowing what happened in the past but as a guide to the future.

Peterson: Memory is the past’s guide to the future.

The strongman and psychotherapist are also fond of noun-strings, especially ones that can make listeners feel vulnerable and therefore more receptive to messaging.

Hitler: hunger and thirst and cold

Peterson: hunger, thirst and pain

Hitler: misery, despair, worries, and collapse

Peterson: despair, disease, aging, and death

Hitler: Fear and distrust, despondency and despair

Peterson: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair

Another Petersonian tactic is

Reviews for The Devil and His Due

[Joel Hatch · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I read this with a sincere hope that it’d open my eyes to something I had not noticed and that maybe I had been played a fool. Turns out I was a fool for believing this book was worth a read.

[yvie · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

If only it were possible to give this garbage 0 stars… this author is an ideologue whose brain has been infected by tribalist propaganda. It’s sad really. Anyone who reads up on Bill C-16 knows what a slippery slope it is, and that the threats of misuse by government officials is absolutely possible. It’s not some made up concern like this hack would have you believe. The nazis are the ones who not only wish to prevent free speech, but wish to compel the speech of others based on a very subjective and contentious politically charged topic- gender theory.

[Kellan Quinn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is endless dribble of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. The amount of time wasted in writing such a worthless book is truly an depressing.

[Chelsea Lewis · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Reason number one is this guy! Yuck!
Don’t waste your time.

[Bob Jones · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Possibly the worst piece of garbage I've come across in a rather long life. He should be sued for every cent he has for this book of outright lies and misrepresentations.

[J W · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Comes across like a poorly executed attempt at riding Jordan Peterson’s coattails to prominence.

[spyderstar · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I wish there was an option to give this garbage zero stars.

[Lukas Pearse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A cognizant and academically sound rebuttal to the self-aggrandizement of the subject.

The negative reviews seem to be from acolytes upset by their hero’s lack of credentials coming home to roost.