Jordan Peterson on Bernie Sanders

Given Jordan Peterson’s strong views on socialism, and Bernie Sanders’ position as an openly democratic socialist, it’s not a surprise to see fans eager to see a debate between the two. However, Dr. Peterson has had reason to mention Bernie in the past and his opinion is what readers might expect. On March 11, 2017 Richard Dawkins, while retweeting a Guardian article, quoted Bernie (speaking about Donald Trump): “Jordan tweeted: “We have a president who is a pathological liar” (Bernie Sanders) . And the more he lies the more they love him.” Jordan Peterson responded, which many took as a rush to defend U.S. president Donald Trump, the following: “And good ole Bernie would have put the policies that ruined Venezuela into operation in the US.” Fans of Jordan will be familiar with his position on Venezuela and their policies. While on the Joe Rogan podcast in January of 2018, Jordan came out firing “they think most people here Marxism and they think socialism…yeah they think pooling all your money together you know making you know making things more like they are in Venezuela where everybody has an equal chance to starve to death.” But Jordan wasn’t quite done with Venezuela, stopping chiming in one more time with this piece of information about the socialist country “Do you know how the Venezuelan government solved the problem of kids starving to death in hospitals? They made it illegal for the doctors to report starvation as the cause of death.” It’s a provocative claim and one that seems to have some truth at its core. An interactive New York Times article discussed the pressures under which doctors in the country feel they are under to avoid reporting deaths from starvation. Some of the doctors in the article (open in incognito if you happen to be out of free NYT previews) reported that they at least a “rough count” of those that died of malnutrition. While we would love to have more sources on this claim, it seems that it would only be either anecdotal claims or secondary sources reiterating the claims of the original source (please contact us if there are sources we are missing or you think are relevant here). Altogether, though this doesn’t seem to be exactly what Jordan was claiming (that it was literally illegal to report malnutrition as the cause of death in Venezuela), it’s difficult to say that he was ‘wrong’ in the general sense of his claim due to a lack of credible/reliable information. Let’s get back to Bernie Sanders and Jordan Peterson. Given Jordan’s propensity for political discourse and his active interest (especially on twitter) with the subject, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the two collide in a public dialogue at some point in the near future.

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