The Re-Education of Jordan Peterson: Why His Clinical Psychology License is Under Threat

So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada. And that your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinions about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events. Well, it's your fault actually. You know, I told you I think a week or so ago when we talked about this. Okay, so let me give you some background here. So I want to know how it's my fault. I will. I'll tell you. I'll tell you. A lot of things are your fault as it turns out. Oh no. Yeah, yeah. So the College of Psychologists has basically levied what are equivalent to about 13 lawsuits against me simultaneously. Now the reason I call them lawsuits is because their actions undertaken on behalf of a complainant. Now the complainant can be anyone anywhere in the world who complains about me for any reason. They don't have to be former clients. They don't even have to be anybody I've ever met. They don't even have to have met anybody I've ever met. So you know. So it could be someone online. Well it is. All this is pretty much all these complaints are someone online. None of them are my clients, although half of them claim to be falsely. And the College didn't throw out their complaints despite that. So which is really quite interesting. And what are the complaints? Well okay let's see. One complaint is about the tweet I made about Ellen or Elliot Page. And when I said that a criminal physician cut off her breasts and that pride was the sin. So now I'm in trouble again because I just said the same thing. One was about Sports Illustrated cover that featured that overweight model and I tweeted out Not Beautiful. And I guess that was something like fat shaming. I don't remember exactly what the charge was. And then I criticized Justin Trudeau and a former staff member of Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. I made a joke about her coming. I was going to New Zealand and the New Zealand leftist press was freaking out. And I made this joke about bringing my alt right trolls to New Zealand. And then I put in parentheses or maybe they're just ordinary people who are trying to clean up their rooms. So apparently that was casting the profession into disgrace. And then they submitted, one complainant from the US submitted the entire transcript of our last discussion. So you know I don't know how to defend myself against that because apparently everything I say and apparently everything you say too is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace. And I think they're most upset in that case about my comments about the inadequacy of climate models. And so you know part of the reason I'm pursuing this action with regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well there's two reasons really. Three, one is you know leave me the hell alone guys. You've been on my case nonstop for seven years. Not once before that. In 20 years of practice. There's no complaints ever levied against me. It wasn't until I started to become you know relatively well known publicly that the college came after me. And seven years of that gets to be a bit much. Especially now that there's 13 lawsuits compiled up and all of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false grounds. But even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle. The reason I'm engaging in the battle is well first of all you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts. It's like experts by what criteria exactly? That's a social media communication expert. You got any documentation that that even exists as a field? And how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me that I'm going to be a better therapist? There's no body of data that suggests that in the least. So I'm not going down that route. We should explain that because that is one of the things. This isn't a threat by the college. This is what the situation already is. I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet. But they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of reeducation. And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional. The first is to take away the license. The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that which they've already done in my case. And so now I have to sit down with these experts at my expense for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college. And that isn't pending an investigation. That's already in place. It's such a wild request. It's retraining. Just even the way they phrase it. It's so bizarre. So Orwellian. Yeah. Well, like I said, it's your fault. Social media. Because it's the whole transcript of our last conversation. I don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one. But the other reason I'm pursuing it, and to the degree that I'm able to keep my head cleared during this process, because it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutia of all these bloody lawsuits trying to figure out what the hell they were up to instead of taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family. So I was very upset about that. But to the degree that I'm upset about it, I'm not doing it right, because this can't be personal. Can't be about me. Part of the reason that I want to pursue this, and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on charter of rights grounds in Canada, is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech. And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me. The reason it's a problem is because the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists. There's all these licensed professions. And if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate conduct of the professionals. Now in a functional time, all that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble get in trouble with their own clients, with the people they've been dealing with directly. And then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a pathologically practicing professional. And fair enough, but now it's been weaponized. And it's now it's been weaponized as a political tool too. And it's not like activists don't know that. And it's so preposterous because I have 20 million people following me on social media. And God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and I have done. It's tens of millions. And how many people complained? 20 out of millions? And then the college didn't have to pursue those complaints. They have to investigate them. So I don't know what they're doing now because of course they've been inundated by thousands of complaints about their own behavior. So I have no idea what they're going to do about that. But they didn't have to investigate. They chose to investigate. And as I said, they did that despite the fact that half the complainants claimed to be my clients and weren't. So what we have here is we have 13 people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know, to someone who they didn't know, anyone who knew on, as a consequence of things I said on social media. And that all of them, not only were they fourth hand claims of harm, which no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement. So the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this. But so not only are they based on fourth hand information and then an outright lie, which is they were clients of mine, they're also predicated on the assumption that it's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism. Because like literally half of them are, well, I said something about Trudeau. I said something about one of his top aides. I said something about Jacinda Ardern. I said something about an Ottawa City Counsellor in relationship to the trucker convoy. I said something about climate. Every single one of the complaints is political. And so why is that a problem? Well, see if you can figure it out for yourself. That'd be the first answer. And the second is I have a friend in Canada, very well known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream. And when this all hit, I reached out to him. He's a very brave guy. He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble. I said, look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Partey, this lawyer at Queen's University who's gone after essentially the college that functions for lawyers. I said, we should do three letters same time saying that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists, with physicians, and with lawyers. And he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare to take on the college. And the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well situated than him or braver. And even he was loath to do it. He'll do it eventually, but not now.