So Mikhaila Peterson, Jordan’s daughter, posted this tweet (which was posted in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group):

(Parenthetically… Fuller? Is that her married name? Interesting if so that she sticks to Peterson as her grift… er, professional name, that must be where the money is…)

Regrettably, when I went to see first-hand what had so hurt Mikhaila’s eyees, daddy had already deleted the offending post. Fortunately (for me, not him) this is the age of the screenshot, and few things are truly lost to the Internet, hence it only took a few seconds to find what the issue was:

WHAT?

WHAT?

WHAT

THE

FUCK?

So… somehow, Jordan “that’s a lot of goats” Peterson saw this BDSM fetish video and, also somehow, decided it must be footage of a Chinese government scheme to separate men from their semen. And then posted it to his Twitter. No wonder Mikhaila was aghast. Plus, as others noted, Peterson’s Twitter following is not only massive (nearly 4m followers—including, alarmingly, a few of my own Twitter mutuals, who I hope are following him ironically but I fear at least one might not be) but, as others have noted. probably also contains a fair proportion of, you know, non-adult people. Teenagers not yet over the age 18. Kids. Being exposed to extreme fetish porn by a complete fucking idiot. I mean, I’m sure most of his actual adult followers really didn’t want to see that either, but the non-adults really didn’t need to see it…

I genuinely don’t know what to make of this. I’ve been loathe to cast doubt on his mental health until now cos I think that sort of thing is too easy to do; I understand where Jake from Bible Reloaded was coming from when he suggested (in as nice a way as possible; I forget exactly which video he first suggested that in, but you really should watch the entire series anyway) that Mr 28% Goats might be somewhere on the autism spectrum, and to be honest that wouldn’t entirely surprise me if he were. But equally he could just be a fucking dreadful human being; I know quite a few people on said spectrum and, oddly enough, being whatever kind of autistic they are hasn’t made any of them completely shitty.

I don’t like medicalising people are who just awful, because when they do/say awful things they should be held accountable, and ascribing some medical condition risks that not happening. This is why I never liked casting aspersions of that sort on Donald Trump when others were diagnosing him with things like the early stages of dementia or something; Trump was and is a monstrous failure of a human being and has never been anything else. Similarly, I’m unhappy about attributing Peterson’s issues to his well-documented drug problems, and I should probably clarify that I don’t judge him at all for having those problems (as someone who was awfully close to alcoholism at one point, more so than I like to think/admit, I can’t really look down on him there). I do judge him for clearly having learned nothing from the experience, but that’s another matter. At any rate, I’ve been doubtful about the extent to which it might’ve affected his mental health, cos he’s such a basically unpleasant person now but then he always has been…

…Up to now, anyway. This whole episode makes so little sense, even I’m starting to question whether Peterson’s mental health actually is heading south in the way some of his critics think. It’s not even that he mistook this porn video for some sort of weird Chinese plot, cos that’s just funny in a faintly tragic sort of way; it’s that he thought it was appropriate to then post it to his Twitter account—which, as I said, probably has a certain number of followers below the legal age to actually view it. I really don’t understand what he was thinking. This goes somewhat beyond him being the sort of buffoon arguing with (while being ignored by) the Pope on Twitter, sniping at trans people and calling an Asian model unattractive. That’s just him being a cunt, this is… something else and I’m not sure what. Remember that time he “quit” Twitter because it was making his life worse? It’s still not doing him any favours…