On Being Expelled from Peterson Academy – Bonus Features
NOTE: This page contains all the extra stuff I didn’t use in my actual blog posts about being expelled from Peterson Academy. For those ones, check out the links here:
PARENTAL NOTE: Like the blog posts this is a “Bonus Features” section for, this page also has content that has been left intact to preserve the sentiments of the original posters being quoted, and so has stronger language than the typical posts on this blog.
Bonus Features Intro
The long and short of it is that I have a ton of receipts.
I think that in light of Peterson’s being willing to say things about us that are patently untrue, it is worth putting this stuff out there somewhere, even if it’s just a tiny corner of the internet that probably most people will overlook because of the author’s stubborn refusal to use a more-readable font.
So, without further ado, here are additional screenshots, references, and snippets of narration that didn’t make the final cut for the narrative blog posts but seemed worth putting out there somewhere:
Notes Cut for Readability
NOTE ON INHERENT BIAS: I think it’s worth mentioning that there was a lot more going on here than just what I’m presenting. There were students, whom I believe were bad actors, that were stirring up extra drama in the middle of all this. There were people who gave opinions without fully understanding what had happened because they were not monitoring the situation as closely as some of us were. Although these things do provide extra context, I do not believe that including them here would change the fundamental points I am trying to make. So, it is worthwhile for the reader to know that we did have some critics and people who seemed pleased at our removal, and that not everyone on the platform agreed with us. Although, from what I have seen, this appeared to be a loud minority.
NOTE ON TIMESTAMPS: I have cobbled this account together with screenshots from a global network of people from the Peterson Academy platform. Because of this, time stamps are all over the place and should be regarded somewhat lightly.
Peterson Academy’s Ironic Lack of Self-Awareness
It was very interesting to watch Peterson Academy from the outside.
The day after the first of us were removed from the platform, a new course was released entitled Modern European History.
My understanding is that this includes discussion on totalitarianism and displaced persons.
[For some reason embedding appears to be removed on this post, so you’ll have to click the link to it here.]
9 January 2025 – X Post by Peterson Academy Promoting their New Course on European History
The next course was even better.
In the first part of February (I may have these dates a smidge off, as I’m using their X posts for reference), they released The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union taught by Michael Malice.
This X post promoting it is:
Lessons From A Communist Regime
“The Soviet Union carried out a practice known as ‘unpersoning’, systematically erasing individuals from history as if they had never existed.
Photos were manipulated to rewrite history. These alterations reshaped reality for millions, erasing people from memory and rewriting the narrative.
Stalin’s Great Terror dismantled civil society, replacing trust with fear.
As Orwell noted, the most frightening part of the Soviet trials wasn’t the terror itself, but how Western intellectuals justified it.
They ignored falsified history, terror, and famine to preserve their ideals about communism.” –@michaelmalice
___
From Michael Malice’s course: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union.
11 February 2025 X Promotion of the new Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union Course by Michael Malice
But irony really peaked about two weeks later.
This is when they introduced the Successful Mistakes in Business course.
The opening line is kind of perfect:
In case you’re reading this where you can’t watch the video, here’s a transcript of what was said:
“What you really want in an organization is a willingness to tell the boss something that’s wrong.
Because I can’t fix a problem that I don’t know about.
The analysis of mistakes, ultimately, is the mechanism that leads to success.”
“When things are not going well, rather than find blame elsewhere, look inside.
Because we all have deficiencies.
We all have blind spots.”
“The best think you could do is understand how to gather the broadest spectrum of information, including the information that you don’t like.
Because it’s telling you something that’s actually valuable.
Be a little cynical.
Question things.
If somebody says, ‘I am the expert,’ that is a starting point for understanding that they’re trying to convince you that their point of view is right because of who they are rather than because of what they know.
If you can understand these constructs: setting goals and decision-making and how to treat other people and how to assess information, that will help you in every element of everything that you do in life.”
X Post from Peterson Academy Promoting Latest Course – 22 January 2025
A little later they released a Skepticism 101 course.
You can’t make this stuff up. 😂
The lack of self-awareness was palpable.
I took all of this to indicate that Jordan Peterson still didn’t know what was going on. I still thought that the fundamental teachings of Peterson Academy were worthwhile overall.
(After all, they got Eric Metaxas to do a whole course on Deitrich Bonhoeffer and I had really been looking forward to that one, having read his Bonhoeffer book a few years prior.)
This remains an ongoing theme.
On June 28th I received this email where they claim Peterson Academy still has the moral high ground over other universities and suggest that it is not suppressing free speech and critical thought:
28 June 2025 Email Banner from Fourth-of-July Sale
More Student Responses
First, here are some more of the students’ responses to Mikhaila’s “work harder” post:
This was a post shortly before we were banned on January 8th, from a student who was fed up with the administration’s handling of things:
Here is a brief comment exchange between two students as the bannings continued to encompass more who had been vocal about their concern that we had been removed:
This is Jeffrey’s original January 21st post about our podcast episode, which got him banned later that day:
Here are some students’ responses from the same day and the day after the podcast was launched:
This is the post a student made when he realized that Jeffrey had been removed from Peterson Academy:
I don’t know if it’s in bad taste for me to include this one, as it’s so over-the-top flattering, but I appreciated this friend’s sticking up for me openly on the platform before asking for a refund (actually, this is the friend who messaged me with great enthusiasm the day that the email came out announcing that we could sign up for the beta in July 2024):
This is a Discord chat from a student who had been a familiar face around the Quad:
Here is a post where another student tried to help Jeffrey find a guest who could provide their side of the story to give the other perspective from students who did not agree with us:
31 January 2025 Post from Student Trying to Help Jeffrey Find Dissenting Voices to Interview to Provide More Context on the PA Debacle
NOTE: Jeffrey has confirmed to me that no one in opposition to us was willing to go on his podcast after all.
Next, here are some additional student responses to our being banned:
21 January 2025 Email Snippet from Student Describing State of the Quad to Me
24 January 2025 Post of Another Student Stepping Away from Participation in the Quad
The day that Stephen decided to step away from his participation in the Quad, another student wrote a you-probably-have-to-have-been-there-to-appreciate-this summary of everything that had gone down.
I thought it worth including here despite a lot of in-jokes and the highly-sarcastic tone, as it sheds further light on how chaotic everything had become with various students on different sides of this issue:
11 January 2025 Student Post Summarizing the Chaos in the Quad
This is a comment someone shared about Jeffrey, which was posted in the middle of the silence from the Peterson Academy admins, and only three days before Jeffrey’s account was banned:
18 January 2025 Student Lauding of Jeffrey’s Character & Podcast
As of around 18 June 2025, people are still watching Jeffrey’s podcast. This is a comment that was left by a student who seems to have just recently watched it:
18 June 2025 Student Comment Referencing Dusty’s @croneofarc Handle on Peterson Academy
Some Twitter Files
I believe that this post of Mikhaila’s indicates what she thinks they were doing in removing us from Peterson Academy:
An X Post of Mikhaila’s from 24 January 2025 Suggesting She May Think We were Students with Cluster-B Personality Issues
Someone on X commented this about the podcast the day after it was released:
22 January 2025 Response on X from a Student who Also Suspected Some
on Peterson Academy to be Bad Actors
I knew this was coming when I challenged Mikhaila in her, “The woke right cancels the woke left,” post:
(While I dislike that we seem to be at odds in the first place and would prefer it if Mikhaila and I could discuss and resolve our differences, I think I’d really like this on a mug just for laughs.)
Q2 Update & Website Redesign
On April 21st, Peterson Academy sent out this new update:
They also updated their website around this time (possibly the same day, as it was brought to my attention on the 21st as well):
For context, this was all rolled out and announced the day before Peterson’s 22 April 2025 Joe Rogan podcast was put out.
Around the same time as this announcement about funding, Peterson Academy quietly granted lifetime access to everyone who had pre-purchased additional years of enrollment between the Black Friday Sale and the buy-up-to-three-years-before-the-pricing-goes-up sale that ran through around January 23rd.
Wikipedia Entry & Better Business Bureau Reviews
As of at least 23 June 2025 (when it was brought to my attention), there is at least mention of this on Peterson Academy’s Wikipedia page.
Here is another snippet from Wikipedia under the Reception and commentary section:
Earlier in 2025, some students chose to lodge complaints about Peterson Academy with the Better Business Bureau (BBB), which you can read here:
Peterson Academy on the Better Business Bureau
Stats
Stephen of the No Regret Gazette kept copies of each daily recap he made from October 16, 2024, to January 12, 2025.
These featured any posts that had enough engagement on them for Stephen to deem them worth listing.
As everything was going down, he began analyzing the posts he’d featured, and found some data I thought was interesting.
Here’s a graph of posts from the top 10 contributors based on popular content over the months:
Top Contributors to Peterson Academy
For scale, the largest pie wedge is 101 posts, and the smallest is 31 posts.
Names marked with dots indicate students that were banned. Names marked with lines indicate students who requested a refund because of the administration’s decisions.
For better visual of student-participation-to-ban-sentiment, here’s a chart showing the same breakdown of top-10 students and their status:
Status of Top Contributors on Peterson Academy
For clarity:
- Red = Banned
- Orange = Left in Protest
- Yellow = Stayed But Against Bans
- Green = For the Bans
- Gray = Tried Requesting a Refund; Denied Because too Late
NOTE: Stephen’s criteria for featuring posts was a minimum of 8 comments. This excluded posts without meaningful discussions (e.g. “Good morning, Peterson Academy!”), and would sometimes include posts with fewer than 8 comments where Stephen deemed the subject matter worthy of promotion.
In addition, while I have done my best to ensure data integrity, it is possible that these charts are off by a little bit. Therefore, I recommend looking at them more as estimates.
Memes
Over this whole time there were a number of memes created by myself and others as a way to process everything with humor.
Here they are, with some having been adjusted to be less pointed at anyone specifically for the sake of not wanting to be attacking people too much publicly:
A Confession & Conspiracy Theory
Okay, so I do have one other theory about why I got banned from Peterson Academy.
You see, while I think I’m pretty okay with a fair amount of pop-cultural stuff, I have gaps in things that I probably should have seen or known about well before now.
Usually when I make references to things, I try to have either seen them or have educated myself on them enough to know that I’m creating a meme (or whatever) in context.
Here I must confess that it wasn’t until the end of May 2025 that I finally watched Mean Girls for the first time.
Back in September of 2024, I created the following meme for Peterson Academy after watching the YouTube snippet of only this scene in order to think I had enough context for the meme:
Meme Posted on Peterson Academy Circa 4 September 2024
As with most people who encounter Regina George for only a bit and don’t get to know her true nature, I totally thought I had enough context for this meme.
She was a nice girl who was including Lindsey Lohan in her friend group.
Surely that was enough context to know this meme would land just fine.
It was a heartwarming tribute to how the Petersons invite lobsters into their school.
Hilariously, this is actually what I thought when I was making it.
Boy, was I wrong!
I think this meme may have resurfaced with someone adding snide comments about it around the time that all the stuff was going down when we were trying to discuss the pricing increases and everything.
I, in my naivety, commented my gratitude at their liking the meme.
I think I also commented on a comment Mikhaila made on it back in October, since I’d missed it when she originally left it and the repost had brought it to my attention.
Here I thought I was kindly addressing something I’d overlooked, and that this would add to my case that I meant well for her and Peterson Academy.
I think it may have had the opposite effect and been unintentionally snarky or with implications opposite to my actual sentiments.
So, my other theory is that Mikhaila thought I was calling her Regina George, found that offensive (as one would), and may have had me removed for this accidentally-egregious joke. 😅
Addendum
Since publishing this blog post in June 2025, there have been some updates, which you can find here:
15 August 2025 New York Post Article
Jordan Peterson ‘taking some time off everything’ as daughter reveals mold exposure illness
(This was originally featured on news.com.au. The original article has some extra details than the NY Post feature.)
3 September 2025 Gadget Channel YouTube Video Feature
I plan to add any other updates to this section of the blog, if it makes sense to do so as they come to my attention.
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