Nellie Bowles’s profile of profit-taking misogynist pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson is astoundingly good and I recommend that it be read in its entirety. There’s so much good stuff it’s hard to know where to begin:

Most of his ideas stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender. “The masculine spirit is under assault,” he told me. “It’s obvious.” In Mr. Peterson’s world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book’s subtitle: “An Antidote to Chaos.”

What kills me about this sexist-Jungian “chaos is feminine” horseshit is that Peterson is an academic. Does he never visit the offices of his colleagues? [Guy peers through a stack of newspapers from the Reagan administration] “manliness is ORDER!”

He is also very successful. His book, “12 Rules for Life,” which was published in January, has sold more than 1.1 million copies. Thanks to his YouTube channel, he makes more than $80,000 a month just on donations. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken his online personality tests and self-improvement writing exercises. The media covers him relentlessly.

The last link is the greatest subtweet ever, Bari none.

For two days in May, Mr. Peterson gives me a view of his life. He shows me his home, lets me listen in on business calls and a Skype session with a fan, and follow him backstage during a speaking engagement at the Queen Elizabeth Theater. He does not smile. He has a weathered, gaunt face and big furrowed eyebrows. He has written about dogs being closest in behavior to humans, but there is something extremely feline about him. He always wears a suit. “I am a very serious person,” he often says.

[Whispers] If you have to keep saying it, you’re not.

Mr. Peterson’s home is a carefully curated house of horror. He has filled it with a sprawl of art that covers the walls from floor to ceiling. Most of it is communist propaganda from the Soviet Union (execution scenes, soldiers looking noble) — a constant reminder, he says, of atrocities and oppression. He wants to feel their imprisonment, though he lives here on a quiet residential street in Toronto and is quite free. “Marxism is resurgent,” Mr. Peterson says, looking ashen and stricken. I say it seems unnecessarily stressful to live like this. He tells me life is stressful.

[Whispers] If you need to festoon your house with bad socialist realist art to convince yourself that the communist takeover of Canada is imminent, it’s not. Also, you’re a loony.

So he was radicalized, he says, because the “radical left” wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. In his book he illustrates this idea with the social behavior of lobsters. He chose lobsters because they have hierarchies and are a very ancient species, and are also invertebrates with serotonin. This lobster hierarchy has become a rallying cry for his fans; they put images of the crustacean on T-shirts and mugs. The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” he said.

I can think of no recent events that would challenge the assumption that patriarchal dominance is based on pure meritocracy.

Now, for some rigorous, coherent, empirically grounded support for this claim:

“It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah,” he says. “Why?” It’s a hard one. “Right. That’s right. You don’t know. It’s because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower.” But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say. “Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”

Jordan Peterson is serious. Very serious. Truly serious.

And now, the unvarnished woman-hating: