I must admit to knowing who Olivia Wilde is because she was on the hit procedural medical drama “House”, and she is kinda hot. Other than for those two reasons, Olivia wouldn’t inhabit the sphere of knowing that surrounds my being.
I don’t know when the “Entertainment Tonight” level controversy surrounding Wilde’s latest directorial effort, “Don’t Worry Darling” came to my attention (frankly, I didn’t know she was directing anything), I just remember not really caring much about it. I think it was when she and Shia LeBeouf were sparring in the entertainment media over whether she fired him or he quit (she made the rounds saying he was fired, he produced recordings of her begging him to stay on) but it might have been her replacing LeBeouf with pop star Harry Styles and then having a tryst with Harry during the filming - but none of that really stuck in my mind because that was just standard Hollywood kindergarten level psychodrama (and I am only aware of Styles because he was a member of the boy band One Direction that was gaining steam when we were living in the UK).
What really stuck was her commentary about Jordan Peterson and how common the origin of such commentary is within the political left.
The villain in her movie is portrayed by Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and when asked about the inspiration for the character, Wilde noted the character was modelled on Peterson. In an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Wilde stated that Peterson is “this insane man Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.”
Peterson is not a pseudo-intellectual, he is legitimate, doing significant work at elite institutions like Harvard and the University of Toronto, and is not a “hero” to the incel community (for those unfamiliar with the term it stands for young, usually awkward, men who are “involuntarily” celibate, allegedly because women can’t see how great they are). Peterson does advocate against the feminization of young men because he believes society needs strong men. That doesn’t mean that men should be abusive misogynists, just that they should be strong enough to lead and withstand life’s challenges.
I happen to agree with Peterson’s position, not because I necessarily think having a penis makes men superior, but because women are humans and subject to the same fallibilities as men. Repressing millennia of male instincts to lead and protect seems not to be such a great idea because several of the women in American leadership don’t seem to be doing such a great job (AOC, the Squad, Mazie Hirono, etc.)
Given Wilde’s take on Dr. Peterson, I wondered where Wilde got her information about him.
I had my suspicions because Wilde is not stupid, she is descended from Scottish royalty and her background is filled with elite private schools (Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts) and was admitted to Bard College (never attended after she chose to act), her parents are journalists and documentary filmmakers, she spent summers in Ireland and after her breakout role as the intern “13” on the medical drama “House”, she campaigned for Obama and Hillary as well as being the face for several left wing causes.
So, in other words, a perfect lib.
And, based on my experiences, the perfect libs rarely venture outside their bubble for information.
A minimal amount of research proved that to be the case with Ms. Wilde.
Wilde was asked in another interview during the press junket for the movie if she had “…read Jordan Peterson or listened to any of his lectures?” Wilde’s reply: “Um, eww! I’ve never drank bleach before, but I know it’s poison!”
Apparently, her view is formed within the left wing, radical feminist bubble formed in columns by feminist writers from feminist outlets like Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, as well as pieces by other lefty male “feminists”.
So, while Wilde is not stupid, she is willfully ignorant.
When I research something, I dig into both sides. For example, when I recently delved into the strange world of Queer Theory trying to understand why the left felt so strongly that kindergartners needed to know about transgenderism and the sexual orientation of their teachers, I didn’t just read critiques of the right (Christopher Rufo and others), I went to the horse’s mouth and read the academic papers of those who claimed to have discovered and formulated this “theory”. It was the same many years ago when I investigated Critical Race Theory, I read the papers produced by those people who promoted the “theory” as if it was Critical Race Fact, not just a theory. I’ve read Marx, Howard Zinn, Marcuse, Ibram Kendi and many others because, rather than reading what others said about them, I wanted to know what they thought in their own words.
In this world, there are people who aggregate because they have independently researched things and through their digging, have come to the similar conclusions - then there are people who aggregate because they want to believe something and are looking for other people who want to believe the same things. The former will look under every rock to find understanding, the latter will simply make things up that fit what they desperately want to believe.
That’s what I found when educating myself on both Queer Theory and CRT. It is all a bunch of true pseudo-intellectualism backed up by irrational (and often contradictory) postmodernist thought. In short, there is little actual evidence for CRT and exactly zero evidence for Queer Theory – both are heavily influenced by two things, the “sentence first, verdict later” process where the conclusion comes before the evidence is considered and the “observer effect”, meaning that things change through the process of observation. Each of these two processes allow the “evidence” to be redefined to fit the conclusion.
And as with CRT and Queer Theory, Wilde’s conclusions about Jordan Peterson are also based on the “sentence first, verdict later” process.
This, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is why I have such a difficult time debating with people on the left. They have no idea that they don’t know what they don’t know – and don’t really care. They have made up their minds and are not going to change no matter what the evidence says.
Blogger Stacy McCain, a longtime favorite of mine, summed up the pattern by stating:
“There is a paranoid pattern of belief on the Left where everything they hate is somehow related to every other thing they hate. For example, liberals hate Trump, and they hate racism, therefore Trump is a racist, and anyone who writes something that liberals consider racist must be connected to Trump.”
About ten years ago, someone (could have been Rush, and how I miss that voice) said that it's time we stopped giving credit for intelligence to people who are so manifestly wrong about everything, referring at the time to His Royal Blackness, Barry 0h.
Wilde is just the same. Born to a good family and blessed in every conceivably possible way - brains, beauty, skill, all the training and schoooling that could be needed - she nevertheless revels in hatred and abject stupidity. At the very least, such people are shockingly ungrateful and lacking in self-awareness. The hell with her. She's an idiot.
I was unaware of Wilde's politics until reading this. I was content to knowing her as 13 on House and aside from that, credibly beautiful. How disappointing!