I met Michael Brooks at a conference in Boise, Idaho in 2018. At the time, we both had book contracts with the same publisher. In the following months, I was lucky enough to read and comment on many, many drafts of what became his excellent book, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right. Five days after getting the awful phone call from a mutual friend telling me that he was dead, I still keep wanting to call Against the Web Michael’s “first book.”

The conference was organized by our mutual editor, Doug Lain. “Responding to Peterson: An Intervention in Lieu of a Debate” came together after Jordan Peterson pulled out of a planned appearance on Doug’s podcast — and then told Joe Rogan that the reason he hadn’t debated any Marxists was that none of us wanted to talk to him.

At one point in my remarks, I playfully mentioned a passage in Peterson’s book, Maps of Meaning, that begs for a Freudian analysis. Michael interjected with a comment that was both cockily confident and slyly self-deprecating. The implication was, basically, “Oh, I don’t traffic in this fancy intellectual stuff. I just do fun stuff like dunk on reactionaries.”