Ken Burch
2 min readSep 9, 2022

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I don't think he has been all that misrepresented, and that was part of the point I was making in the response you responded to there.

He may have said that incels should work on themselves and not resent women- though I don't know to what degree he has emphasized the "don't resent women" part of his message- but his conspiratorial discourse and his "yes, there are larger forces out there who want to take everything away from you" message has helped to keep the incel mindset alive- without the belief that any movement for change and any ideas for change could ONLY be the product of a conspiracy, the growth of the incel mindset, which is grounded in both an exaggerated sense of entitlement and the equally exaggerated sense that there are plots afoot to take away "what is ours"- would not have gained purchase.

Peterson is responsible for at least some of the misrepresentation, in his unwillingness to make the "don't resent women" part of his message central and his failure to clarify exactly what he meant by 'compulsory monagamy", when he saw that huge numbers of people were interpreting that phrase as a call for the return of arranged marriage.

Peterson knows how words work; he shapes them to suit his intent constantly. It's fair to ask why he didn't shape his words and his discourse precisely on this, and why he does not feel he needs to break from his constant spreading of conspiratorial paranoia.

You would concede, I assume, that the idea that any movement for social change is a product of "cultural Marxism" and will inevitably turn us the countries we currently live in into recreations of the worst of the USSR under Stalin, is an inherently ridiculous and damaging set of assertions to make, and that he should stop saying things like that before he gets innocent people killed just for being activists.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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