Jordan Peterson: Power Broker

Jordan Peterson is a co-founder of The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Episode two of The Takeover examines his career from a psychology professor at the University of Toronto to wildly successful author and guru for dissatisfied young men and now leader of a global movement to create a right-wing world. 

 Listen here.

The episode walks us through the relationship between Peterson and his ARC co-founder, a British baroness and would-be politician, to bring together powerful people from the UK, Canada, the US and Australia, among others, to chart a new path for conservatives. 

But before he was helping organize a global shift in conservative ideology — at a moment when a reinvigorated right is ascendant in much of the western world — Peterson was in a fight with his school.

Many people first heard of Peterson when he got in trouble at  the University of Toronto and Canada’s Human Rights Commission over a change to the Human Rights Act. It was amended to include sexual orientation as a prohibited grounds of discrimination extending LGBTQ+ individuals. 

“But it seems to me that we are in danger of crossing a line. With bill C16 and the surrounding legislation it is the first time in legislative history where people are attempting to make us speak their language,” said Peterson at one of many protests at campuses across the country. 

But refusing to call people by their preferred pronoun was just the beginning of Peterson’s fight with the university.

A couple of years later he published a book that vaulted him to fame, particularly among young men who “hadn’t grown up,” according to Peterson. The book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is essentially a self-help book for living a life. 

The book’s tours and subsequent speaking engagement put Peterson into the orbit of rich and powerful people around the world. He started a podcast, which initially focused on his books and his lectures but then shifted to interviewing people who had very specific takes on the big issues of the day.

Many of the guests were Canadians such as Ezra Levant, owner of the far-right website Rebel News, Tamara Lich before she became an organizer of the convoy takeover of Ottawa, and Canadian politicians like Danielle Smith, Pierre Poilievre and Maxime Bernier. 

By 2023 he got together with Philippa Stroud, and funded by British hedge fund manager, Paul Marshall and a Dubai-based investment company The Alliance of Responsible Citizenship. 

Listen to episode two, Jordan Peterson, Power Broker here.