Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson

The Canadian psychology professor’s stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline—and deeply vulnerable.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-the-left-is-so-afraid-of-jordan-peterson/567110/

August 2018

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

The boys graduated from high school and went off to colleges where they were exposed to the kind of policed discourse that dominates American campuses. They did not make waves; they did not confront the students who were raging about cultural appropriation and violent speech; in fact, they forged close friendships with many of them. They studied and wrote essays and—in their dorm rooms, on the bus to away games, while they were working out—began listening to more and more podcasts and lectures by this man, Jordan Peterson.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations.

Because all of this was happening silently, called down from satellites and poured in through earbuds—and not on campus free-speech zones where it could be monitored, shouted down, and reported to the appropriate authorities—the left was late in realizing what an enormous problem it was becoming for it. It was like the 1960s, when kids were getting radicalized before their parents realized they’d quit glee club. And it was not just college students. Not by a long shot.

Around the country, all sorts of people were listening to these podcasts. Joe Rogan’s sui generis show, with its surpassingly eclectic mix of guests and subjects, was a frequent locus of Peterson’s ideas, whether advanced by the man himself, or by the thinkers with whom he is loosely affiliated. Rogan’s podcast is downloaded many millions of times each month. Whatever was happening, it was happening on a scale and with a rapidity that was beyond the ability of the traditional culture keepers to grasp. When the left finally realized what was happening, all it could do was try to bail out the Pacific Ocean with a spoon.

The alarms sounded when Peterson published what quickly became a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, because books are something that the left recognizes as drivers of culture. The book became the occasion for vicious profiles and editorials, but it was difficult to attack the work on ideological grounds, because it was an apolitical self-help book that was at once more literary and more helpful that most, and that was moreover a commercial success. All of this frustrated the critics. It’s just common sense! they would say, in one arch way or another, and that in itself was telling: Why were they so angry about common sense?

The critics knew the book was a bestseller, but they couldn’t really grasp its reach because people like them weren’t reading it, and because it did not originally appear on The New York Times’s list, as it was first published in Canada. However, it is often the bestselling nonfiction book on Amazon, and—perhaps more important—its audiobook has been a massive seller. As with Peterson’s podcasts and videos, the audience is made up of people who are busy with their lives—folding laundry, driving commercial trucks on long hauls, sitting in traffic from cubicle to home, exercising. This book was putting words to deeply held feelings that many of them had not been able to express before.

It's hard to think of a best-selling self-help book whose author has not appeared on the classic morning shows; these programs—Today and Good Morning America and CBS This Morning—are almost entirely devoted to the subject of self-help. But the producers did their part, and Peterson did not go to their studios to sit among the lifestyle celebrities and talk for a few minutes about the psychological benefits of simple interventions in one’s daily life. This should have stopped progress, except Peterson was by then engaged in something that can only be compared to a conventional book tour if conventional book tours routinely put authors in front of live audiences well in excess of 2,500 people, in addition to the untold millions more listening to podcasts and watching videos. (Videos on Peterson’s YouTube channel have been viewed, overall, tens of millions of times.) It seemed that the book did not need the anointing oils of the Today show.

The left has an obvious and pressing need to unperson him; what he and the other members of the so-called “intellectual dark web” are offering is kryptonite to identity politics. There is an eagerness to attach reputation-destroying ideas to him, such as that he is a supporter of something called “enforced monogamy,” an anthropological concept referring to the social pressures that exist in certain cultures that serve to encourage marriage. He mentioned the term during a wide-ranging interview with a New York Timesreporter, which led to the endlessly repeated falsehood that he believes that the government should be in the business of arranging marriages. There is also the inaccurate belief that he refuses to refer to transgender people by the gendered pronoun conforming to their identity. What he refuses to do is to abide by any laws that could require compelled speech.

There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. He’s a Jungian and that isn’t your cup of tea; he is, by his own admission, a very serious person and you think he should lighten up now and then; you find him boring; you’re not interested in either identity politics or in the arguments against it. There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying duringa speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

Perhaps, then, the most dangerous piece of “common sense” in Peterson’s new book comes at the very beginning, when he imparts the essential piece of wisdom for anyone interested in fighting a powerful, existing order. “Stand up straight,” begins Rule No. 1, “with your shoulders back.”

CAITLIN FLANAGAN is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. She is the author of Girl Land and To Hell With All That.

Sam Harris Asks Questions Jordan Peterson Can’t Answer

[Update, 7/30: Wow, that escalated quickly! If you enjoy this, see my follow-up piece here, in which I start answering some of Sam Harris’s questions. Thanks for reading!]

BY ESTHER O’REILLY

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/youngfogey/2018/07/sam-harris-asks-questions-jordan-peterson-cant-answer/

July 23, 2018

Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris

To say Jordan Peterson has had a busy summer would be an understatement. His book tour has taken him around the country and the world, peppered throughout with multiple interviews and other appearances. Those of us who have stuck with him since his initial viral rise have been all too happy to gobble up the new content, though we do wonder when the man has found time to sleep. Among these numerous appearances, perhaps his most anticipated have been a series of debates with Sam Harris.

Sam Harris is a name some Christian readers may feel they haven’t heard in a while. He burst onto the scene in 2004 as the youngest of the infamous “Four Horsemen” (together with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens). Books like The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation were hailed glowingly as “a sustained nuclear assault” and “a breath of fresh fire” against the plague of religion, including Judeo-Christian religion.

But if the Four Horsemen were a band, we’d say they broke up a long time ago. Hitchens is dead, Dennett is old, and Dawkins was last seen wondering whether maybe we should de-stigmatize cannibalism. Harris, on the other hand, has launched a successful solo career, including but not limited to developing his own theory of morality, networking with free speech and anti-Islam activists, and offering meditation workshops. For the most part, these enterprises have run on parallel tracks to the critique of Judeo-Christian ideas in particular.

However, with the rise of Jordan Peterson, Judeo-Christian ideas are getting a new lease on life, if not in an orthodox sense, at least in a sense that still makes Sam Harris uncomfortable. It bothers Sam intensely that Peterson could sell out a theater multiple nights in a row for an in-depth lecture series on the book of Genesis. It bothers him that Peterson doesn’t dismiss Christianity as primitive Stone Age thinking. It bothers him, because it shows that for all the Horsemen’s yeomanly efforts, the Bible still hasn’t been relegated to the dustbin of history. And the effects are making themselves felt within his very own fan base, causing one YouTuber to ask in so many words “Is Sam Harris Losing his Audience to Jordan Peterson?”

But Harris is a fairly equable conversation partner, and the fact that he and Peterson have recently been thrown together in the strange conglomerate known as “The Intellectual Dark Web” has made it inevitable that they would meet formally to hash these questions out. Harris and Peterson met in four debates total this month, including two held in Vancouver and two held in the British isles. Diverging from the opening statement/cross-examination/rebuttal format of a typical debate, they functioned more as free-wheeling dialogues, occasionally punctuated by contributions from a moderator (in Vancouver, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein did the honors, while in Dublin and London they were joined by British journalist Douglas Murray, on whom more anon).

All four were sold out and professionally filmed, but to the ire of many fans (and the openly expressed disapproval of Bret Weinstein himself), producer Travis Pangburn has chosen to delay their release until August. Fortunately, bootleg audio of the debates has surfaced on YouTube. They might not be there for long, but meanwhile, I’ve listened to all four and found them to be a rich vein of discussion material. For Harris to have emerged as a challenger to Peterson is not something I would have predicted. But their live fencing matches have fascinatingly and tellingly exposed the fault lines in both men’s thinking. They are a must-hear for any Christian who wants to understand our culture’s spiritual zeitgeist, not only for what Harris and Peterson are bringing to the table, but for how the crowd is reacting to them.

So, while Pangburn dawdles, let’s discuss.

First of all, in case any confusion still remains (and in some circles apparently it does), it should be emphasized that while Peterson functions as the avatar of religion in these debates, the jury is still out for him on the truth claims of Christianity proper. He is a thoroughgoing pragmatist in the technical sense that if you’ve found an idea that seems to work in your everyday life, the mere fact that the idea works makes it true. Thus, when he observes that he cannot help resorting to religious language when dealing with his clinical patients, or that Christianity seems to be the engine that has historically kept Western civilization from descending into nihilism, as far as he is concerned this makes Christianity true. Or at least, true enough.

If that strikes you as a rather alien definition of “truth,” Sam Harris agrees with you, and I agree with Sam Harris. To speak truthfully, in the classical understanding, is to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not. In modern parlance, we would call this the “correspondence theory” of truth. It’s the only logically sustainable theory.

But Peterson is not so much concerned with logical sustainability. He’s concerned withsustainability, period. And he believes we have already seen what happens when atheists behave in consistently logical fashion. For him, the path of truth is synonymous with the path that takes Western civilization as far away from the gas chambers and the gulags as possible.

Here is where Harris raises his hand to protest that this is rather insulting, considering he’s written a whole book developing an atheistic framework for morality. If only enough people would just be reasonable and buy it (pun intended), we could have our cake and eat it too. Imagine no gas chambers, no gulags, and no God. It’s easy if you try. Needless to say, Peterson is unconvinced.

But now here’s the question of the hour: What are we talking about when we talk about God?

Sam Harris has had his answer since 2004: God is a personal entity, outside space-time yet able to intervene in human affairs. God is a Being to whom one could pray, and from whom one could expect to receive an answer. Sam Harris, of course, does not believe in such a God. But he knows whom he has not believed.

There was a time not so long ago when Jordan Peterson’s answer was more or less equally clear. As recently as half a year ago, when a reporter asked “Are you a Christian? Do you believe in God?” he answered, “I think the proper response to that is no, but I’m afraid He might exist.” This is the voice of Jordan Peterson, the modern man, articulating if not a properly atheistic response, at least a recognizably agnostic one.

But lately, he has been less forthcoming, asking what the questioner means by “God” and “belief.” At times he has appeared downright testy. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Sam Harris, who wonders why Peterson can’t just unequivocally say “No,” like every other sophisticated person in Sam’s world. All right then, he asks Peterson in Vancouver, night one, what do you mean by God?

Jordan obliges, with a volley of definitions: “God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence of an action of consciousness across time.” “God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.” “God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values.” “God is the voice of conscience.” “God is the source of judgment, mercy, and guilt.” “God is the future to which we make sacrifices.”

An intriguing volley, to be sure. But not quite what Sam Harris is talking about when he talks about God. It’s all very well to talk about the utility of a God-concept. The problem for Harris is that civilized people in the 21st century still believe in a magical man in the sky. And they still believe in a magical man who performed miracles and rose from the dead. To kick off the London debate, Harris takes a straw poll of people in the audience (about 10,000 strong), to see what percentage believes in a personal, prayer-answering, living and active god. He then points at the ones who cheered affirmatively and turns to Peterson: “This is my concern.”

In Vancouver, night two, Harris zeroes in on the resurrection. Surely, as a man of science, Peterson can at least acknowledge that the resurrection probably didn’t happen? Surely this is the lowest of all possible bars for a modern man to clear? The ensuing exchange is fascinating:

Harris: “Let’s put this probabilistically. Anything is possible. I’ll tell you that it’spossible that he was physically resurrected.”

Peterson: “Well wait a second, I didn’t say that he was. I said it would take me 40 hours to answer the question. I didn’t say that he was.”

Harris: “Well how’s this for an answer: Almost certainly not.”

[loud applause]

Harris again: “What’s wrong with that?”

[more applause and some laughter as Peterson pauses]

Peterson [testily]: “It’s a fine answer, and people have been giving that answer for a very long period of time. But the idea doesn’t seem to go away.”

Harris: “And that’s evidence of what, exactly?”

Peterson: “I don’t know.”

 Aye, there’s the rub. Peterson is a man in two minds. He is two men in one man: There’s Jordan Peterson, the man who feels in every fiber of his being that we are more than merely material, that we have souls (whatever this means), that we are made in the image of God (whatever this means), and that the only way through life is to imitate Christ (whatever this means). And then there’s Jordan Peterson, the man of science, the man of hard data and experimentation and evidence, who told a journalist he left the church in his teens for “the reasons that everyone’s leaving.” This is the Jordan Peterson who finally does say in so many words to Sam, “I mean, I’m perfectly aware that making a deistic case or a case for religion in the face of the rationalist atheists is…well, it’s a very, very difficult thing to manage.”

It is telling that when Harris mockingly compares belief in God to a belief in Catgirl or astrology in these debates, Jordan’s immediate reaction is not to protest that this is a category error, but to say Catgirl and astrology aren’t as silly as all that. Indeed, the make-believe games of children and the make-believe games of adults are all equally fascinating, provided you view them all as manifestations of the same unfathomably deep psycho-evolutionary phenomena.

But, Harris protests, we are children no more. We must become men and put away childish things. We must, to the best of our ability, live as integrated beings. And we must respect the man in the crowd enough to tell him he’s wrong, instead of implying that “stupid people still need their myths.” This is the part where Peterson interjects, “We’re all stupid.” “We’re not that stupid,” Sam fires back. We’ve kept up this charade of Santa Claus in the sky long enough. It’s time to break the spell. It’s time to wake up.

Douglas Murray

Here, a third player enters the stage: the aforementioned Douglas Murray, who sits literally and figuratively between Harris and Peterson in the British debates. Harris tells the audience that they would be gravely mistaken to view Murray as a mere third wheel for the main event. He’s right. A verbal wunderkind, Murray wrote a biography in his teens, wrote a book-length defense of neo-conservatism in his 20s, and has established himself as a world-class authority on international politics, with particular emphasis on Islam and immigration. For a sample of his formidable oratory talents, look no further than this blistering speech on the prospect of a nuclear Iran, delivered when he looks to have been roughly my age. Murray is still only 39 years old.

If you examine Murray’s work, you will see that in his genteel British way, he has been saying many of the same things Peterson is saying. On his side of the pond, he sees how Islam has rushed into the hollowed-out corpse of European Christendom. He sees that nature abhors a vacuum, and for a continent to lose its faith has been to lose everything. So when European parents reflect that maybe church and Christian school would be “good for the kids,” Murray isn’t inclined to argue with them. Indeed, he is inclined to think that even a watered-down, cultural Christianity may be the last bulwark between Europe and its death, be it death by Islam or death by assisted suicide.

So yes, Sam Harris is welcome to trot out his moral landscape and assure us, like the meme, “This is fine.” But as Murray dryly puts it in one of the UK debates, “Underneath Sam Harris, it’s hell.”

Yet, if you ask Murray what he personally believes, he will tell you that of course, a perfectly rational man can’t really be a Christian any more. That spell broke for him long ago, when he discovered how German higher criticism had (he thought) decisively disqualified the Bible as a source of reliable truth claims. In the article where he first “came out” atheist, he recalls how his younger, painfully devout Anglican self tried to wade through this scholarship and put it aside with a shudder. He never looked back. Once you’ve learned Santa Claus isn’t real, you can’t unlearn it.

Now ten years on from that article, Murray speaks with the voice of an older and wiser man, a man who’s simply too tired to muster his old callow insouciance about religion. The glibness of the New Atheists is cold comfort to him. It’s all very well for Richard Dawkins to announce that science has “solved” everything. But as Murray devastatingly writes in his book The Strange Death of Europe, “…[M]ost of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings.” (p. 267) The pat evolutionary narrative tells us one thing. Intuition tells us another thing. It tells us we are more than mere animals, mere cogs in the wheel. “We know we are something else, even if we do not know what that else is.”

And right there in a nutshell, Murray captures why Sam Harris is losing his audience to Jordan Peterson: People are tiring of glib. They have a need that is unmet, a void that is unfilled. And, as Peterson bluntly informs Harris on stage in London, watered-down Buddhism isn’t going to fill it.

But I would like to give Sam Harris his due. Setting aside the fact that no materialist truly practices what he preaches, at least his sermon has a point: We were not made to be split beings. We were not made to stake ourselves on blind faith. Our hearts and minds, our instincts and our knowledge, are meant to be aligned.

Jordan Peterson cannot offer such an alignment. But Christians can. More specifically, Christians prepared to give a rational answer for the hope that is in them. Christians prepared to stand up and politely demur that the ship of rational faith did not sail with theH. M. S. Beagle, that David Hume and David Strauss were beaten at their own game bytheir own contemporaries, and that you are quite welcome to approach the Bible as you would approach any historical document, because it is more than equal to the scrutiny.

This is not a sexy thing to say. It’s not a popular thing to say. It requires patience and time. It requires that we go back to the stack of books that the anguished young Douglas Murray shoved aside for another day. It requires that we take a hard look at the explanatory power of the Darwinian model. It requires that we ask the heirs of Hume just what exactly they mean by “extraordinary evidence.” It requires that we give Sam Harris what he wants when he asks us to put the resurrection probabilistically, which requires that we learn something about probability theory.

Now I say “we,” but I recognize that for many of my Christian readers, this sort of thing is just not your bag. I don’t wish to bind burdens on anyone’s backs. But let me make this appeal, at least: If you are a pastor, or a youth leader, or anyone with any kind of status in your church community, don’t hush people when they come to you with intellectual doubts.

Don’t hush the high-schooler who slides his Bible across your desk and says, “Explain to me why I should believe this book.”

Don’t brush aside the 13-year-old Jordan Peterson in your pew who walks into your office and says, “I’ve read Darwin you know. What’s up?”

You can say they’re being cocky. You can say they’re just making excuses. And maybe you’re right. But maybe you’re wrong—fatally, spectacularly wrong.

And if you can’t answer their questions, seek help from those who can. Say yes when they offer to speak at your church. Say yes when they offer you resources. Don’t shrug them off with a “Thanks, but we’re okay,” because I can assure you that some significant percentage of your young people are not okay. And if you don’t anticipate and repair what cracks are forming now, they may never be whole again.

Sam Harris is right to be worried. He’s right to be nervous. But he’s also right to sense that at the end of the day, Jordan Peterson can’t answer the questions he’s asking. This is not because Jordan Peterson is a con man. He’s simply a man who still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

As Christians, we have an opportunity to complete the work Peterson has begun, whether he realizes it or not. We have an opportunity to show how the mind’s understanding might meet the heart’s longing. We have an opportunity to point people to the God who gave us faith and reason, and pronounced them both good.

Jordan Peterson is keeping the ball in the air. It’s up to the Church to get it over the net.

TOTALITARIANISM IN DURHAM

Government officials attempt to "no-platform" Jordan Peterson.

By Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270763/totalitarianism-durham-matthew-vadum

July 17, 2018

Jordan Peterson and Durham Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson

Leftist city officials in Durham, N.C., are trying to censor conservative academic Jordan B. Peterson by denying him a platform for an upcoming local talk about his bestselling self-help book.

This attack on Peterson is part of a larger assault on conservatives’ free speech rights in the Trump era. Demonstrators have shut down or tried to shut down Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and David Horowitz, to name a few targets. Social media companies brazenly discriminate against conservatives and the crimes of former IRS official Lois Lerner against conservative activist groups remain unprosecuted.

Peterson is a former Harvard clinical psychology professor who is scheduled to speak Sept. 10 at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), which is owned by the City of Durham. Contrary to local media reports, he was not invited to speak by DPAC: he rented the venue.

The date is part of a speaking tour to promote his acclaimed self-help book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Durham won’t be Peterson’s first appearance in an intellectually hostile left-wing urban center in the U.S. Now a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, he has already spoken in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Ore. 

Peterson’s talk on “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege” at a conference held last fall in Washington, D.C., helped to bring his message to a new audience and may have played a role in his meteoric rise. 

The radical office-holders in charge in Durham are terrified of Peterson, what he represents, and what he might say on their turf.

Perhaps for good reason.

If you have any doubt what is motivating this fear among left-wingers, just watch Peterson’s merciless, masterful dismantling of UK’s Channel 4 reporter Cathy Newman’s tired old feminist and leftist talking points. Peterson is utterly fearless, always amply armed with facts, and intellectually intimidating.

This could help explain why Durham Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson posted a unanimously-endorsed city council statement on Facebook in hopes of creating the political pressure needed to shut Peterson down.

The bizarre document amounts to a passive-aggressive defense of free speech protections in the First Amendment. The city council claims to support Peterson’s right to express himself in public but at the same time wants him to refrain from exercising this right.

Peterson attacked the city council statement, calling it "a conceptually brutal mishmash of self-righteousness, indignation and utter moral and political confusion." It is “one of the purest demonstrations I have yet seen of the tendency for the ideologically possessed to use denouncement tactically as a means to amplify and exaggerate personal or identity-group virtue.”

Stopping someone from speaking is called no-platforming (or sometimes de-platforming). In “Repressive Tolerance,” the late Brandeis University professor Herbert Marcuse, the so-called father of the New Left, favored shutting down non-leftists on the theory that fascists, or those merely smeared as fascists by leftists, are not entitled to free speech.

The city’s complaint begins with an attempt to intimidate Dr. Peterson, along with predictably dishonest leftist drivel about the intellectual content of his work.

We would like to be clear that we respect Mr. Peterson’s right to hold his opinions and to freely state his opinions without government interference. However, we wish to emphasize that a person’s right to free speech does not include the right to a platform or an audience. As many in our community have been disturbed and angered by Mr. Peterson’s racist, misogynist, and transphobic views, we would like to use this opportunity to reiterate our commitments and values to all of you as your elected representatives.

The smearing continues in a kind of municipal mission statement that checks off all the politically correct boxes.

We believe that Durham is a place for all of us - black, white, Asian, Latinx, indigenous, and mixed-race, trans and cis, gay and lesbian, queer, and straight, disabled and able-bodied, young and elderly, women, men, and non-binary, native and immigrant, secular and people of faith. Those who seek to exclude or deny the humanity of others will find no comfort here.

We believe that everyone in our city should have the opportunity to thrive in an equitable and inclusive community. We understand that this opportunity has been intentionally and unjustly denied to many of our residents on the basis of race, class, gender, and other aspects of their identities. We are committed to taking action to remedy these injustices.

 The city council suggests that Peterson is some kind of fascistic control freak whose ideas would somehow turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale.

The city council continues implying Peterson is guilty of a laundry list of offenses, but without providing any evidence:

We believe that violence against women is horrific and unacceptable under any circumstances. Women do not owe anyone access to or any level of control over their bodies or sexuality. We honor trans and non-binary residents and believe that respecting each other requires a commitment to using the names and pronouns that each of us identifies with. We will do all that we can to ensure that trans and non-binary people feel safe and respected in our community.

We invite the Durham community to recommit ourselves to these values as a city and a community and to reject and resist bigotry wherever we encounter it.

In other words, according to this nonsense Jordan B. Peterson is an enemy of the people who must be stopped.

Peterson tore the statement apart.

"Everything that is reprehensible about the radical and ideologically-possessed left – all the moral self-righteousness, the platitudes, the clichés, the mindless celebration of diversity for the sake of the demonstration of tolerance, the naivete, and the appalling malevolence of casual denunciation – is on painful display in this missive," he wrote. 

The leftist hysteria in Durham is more than a little familiar to those of us who witnessed the Left’s apoplectic spasms over the rise of academic Camille Paglia, the refreshingly un-PC liberal lesbian whose 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, spurned outrage on university campuses at the time groaning under the yoke of repressive, male-hating, radical feminism.

Durham is Ground Zero for faddish leftist boycotts.

Last week at least five Durham officials aligned themselves with Antifa as they signed a letter demanding the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In April, Durham became the first American city to bar its police from training in Israel. “The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israel Police have a long history of violence and harm against Palestinian people and Jews of Color,” according to a resolution approved unanimously by the city council.

Last year the Durham City Council cheered on radical groups that unlawfully ripped down a Confederate war memorial at city hall. Prosecutions fizzled out before they even got started.

The toxic leftism of Durham officials has ruined lives. 

No one will soon forget how an overzealous, racist prosecutor and scores of local academics tried to lynch three white members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team after they were accused of the March 13, 2006 gang rape of black exotic dancer Crystal Gail Mangum that never happened. In the end, politically correct button-pusher Mike Nifong (D), the out-of-control district attorney in Durham, was disgraced, disbarred, and found guilty of contempt. Duke and Durham have never recovered from the disgraceful incident whose shadow still hangs over the community.

Clearly Durham has not learned its lesson.

3 Things I Learned From Attending Jordan Peterson’s Sold-out Show In DC

By Juliana Knot
http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/11/i-attended-jordan-petersons-show-here-are-three-things-i-learned/
June 11, 2018




Photo by Travis Rupert of Pexels

Renowned psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson took the stage at the sold-out Warner Theater in Washington DC Friday night. The crowd got on its feet and started cheering, ecstatic to hear him speak.

Peterson gained fame after opposing a Canadian bill that criminalized using the wrong pronouns for transgender persons. His notoriety only grew from there after a video of his interview with British broadcaster Cathy Newman went viral. Now, he’s got a cult following who call themselves “lobsters” (in reference to an example in the viral interview) and a best-selling book titled “12 Rules for Life.”

That night, Peterson worked through only nine of the twelve rules, drawing from clinical psychology, philosophy, and common sense. Before he started walking through his rules, he talked about what motivated him.

Earlier that day, he and Dave Rubin, a YouTube personality who opened the show and appeared on The Federalist Radio Hour last week, were at the Lincoln Memorial when a young man walked up to them. This man’s brother had been going through a divorce when he started watching Peterson lectures online. The advice Peterson gave helped turn his brother’s life around. Peterson said these experiences were the highlight of what he did.

“It’s personal, not political,” he said.

It’s an important clarification, because most of the coverage of Peterson has been only the latter. He’s either a spokesman for alt-right hatred or the last defense against stifling political correctness. Yet Peterson is a clinical psychologist. According to him, his aim is to help people.

Before attending this event, I had very little knowledge of Peterson and his views. I had seen clips of his famous interview and glanced at his 12 rules, but lacked an understanding of him and his work. Here are three things I learned about Jordan Peterson after attending his show.

1. Peterson Is Not an Alt-right Demagogue

Many on the Left have criticized Peterson and his followers as disgruntled white men, hiding their pent-up racism and sexism behind pseudo-intellectual talk. A columnist from The Nation states that Peterson has a “far-right political agenda” and advises her reader to avoid dating one of his fans.

Peterson certainly doesn’t play the alt-right type by wearing a three-piece navy-blue suit and drinking Perrier. Throughout his lecture, he paced the stage, not goose-stepped, and took frequent pauses in order to word his next thought carefully. This is not the demeanor of a brazen white nationalist.

Neither was his message. He did not blame women or minorities for the problems in his followers’ lives. Rather, it actually targeted his followers themselves. Peterson asked the crowd repeatedly, “If your life is truly miserable, are you actually doing all that you can to make it better?” He also has called for people to restrain themselves from violence and focus on managing themselves rather than attempting to manipulate or bully others.

Additionally, his rules called for vulnerability and personal suffering rather than blood and soil. His first rule is probably the best example of this. It states: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. At first glance, one might pounce on this as a command to show the world who’s boss. That is not the case. Peterson told the crowd to be open to the wounds of the world, so they can experience its suffering and learn from it. His message does not seek to oppress or dehumanize. Rather, it seeks truth and meaning.

2. Peterson Can Help You Help Yourself, But Not Save You

Because Peterson is seeking out truth and meaning, he can’t avoid questions of faith. In fact, he calls the propositions on which he bases his rules “religious, because they’re about the fundamental reality of life.” His propositions are these:

1. Life is tragic.

2. The world’s tragedy is touched with malevolence, because humans often make their suffering worse.

3. In order to contend with this suffering, one must have a “noble goal to justify your existence, clear your conscience, and get yourself out of bed.”

Most world religions contain the first two premises in some form. Even secular humanism acknowledges that the world is a broken place. Peterson noted that “’You’re perfectly okay the way you are’ is the most pessimistic advice you can receive.” If this is the best humanity can do, we all will start staring into the abyss very soon. In fact, our society has already done a good deal of that lately.

Peterson’s third conclusion doesn’t meet his prior statement. He claims that he’s become an optimist about the human condition because he’s such a pessimist about the state of the world. “The grandeur of the human spirit” is enough to confront the worst pain that we face today, he says.

These rules can repair and improve things like mindset, work ethic, and family life, which are very important things. However, they fall short in addressing the brokenness of the human soul. That’s because, even at our best, we can’t follow Peterson’s 12 rules perfectly. Even if we could, we wouldn’t be immune to senseless tragedies like death and illness. Our hurt stretches far deeper than his moral guidelines can reach.

To be fair, I don’t think Peterson believes that his 12 rules are the cure-all for the world’s brokenness. However, for his many secular followers, this is the sole semblance of religion they have, so they are going to treat it as such.

3. Peterson Isn’t Going Anywhere Any Time Soon

Natalie Wynn, a transgender person, responded to Peterson in a NSFW video, admitting, “[People] have this need to have purpose in the face of suffering and like not just complain about patriarchy.” Peterson recognizes that it is not enough to stand against bad ideology; people also need a positive belief system.

Peterson engages the common YouTuber in questions of truth and meaning. He acknowledges and fills a gap in society. He doesn’t show open disdain for people who haven’t read Plato, but speaks to his crowds at their level, showing how complex philosophy has the potential to improve one’s life.

Peterson also engages with his fame well. He treats it with caution and doesn’t revel in his spotlight. During the question and answer, he said he thinks his fame “will end in catastrophe at any moment.” This mindset gives his message endurance over the fleeting fame that so many viral stars chase. It is unlikely he’ll burn out like Milo Yiannopolous, an actual provocateur. Peterson’s tour is only halfway through, and his videos still rack up millions of views all over the Internet.

As I left the theater, I noticed that the woman sitting in the row in front of me wore lobster earrings. As I walked out, I saw a man who had donned a lobster hat, complete with antennae. He waved his red foam claw around and shouted that this was the best show he had ever been to. Peterson’s message is one focused on finding meaning, not fueling hate. Although it’s not a saving message, it’s one we’ll be hearing for a long time.

Juliana Knot is an intern at the Federalist.

Jordan Peterson Plays in the Left’s Cultural Sandbox

By David French
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/jordan-peterson-new-york-times-hostility/
May 22, 2018



 Rarely in my life have I read a more hostile or vicious takedown of a public figure than last week’s New York Times profile of Canadian author and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Rarely have I witnessed a more bizarre and bad-faith interview of a public figure than journalist Cathy Newman’s January interrogation of Peterson on Britain’s Channel 4 News. Few public figures inspire more vitriol and mockery on Twitter than, you guessed it, Jordan Peterson. And never before have I seen vitriol so out of proportion to the “threat” of the man’s underlying message.

I don’t claim to be an expert on everything the man’s said, but I read and reviewed his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, and I’ve watched many of his most popular YouTube videos — and the contrast between the actual content of his message and the rage and mockery it elicits never fails to surprise me. Have we really reached the point where the basic argument that men and women are different, or that free men and women will often make different choices in large part because they are different, or that religion and ancient traditions can inform and guide our lives today, are now so toxic that their advocates must and should face a relentless campaign to drive them from the public square?

Or, given the obvious crisis that young men face — with rising rates of suicide and drug overdose, and diminishing educational outcomes — why the extraordinary hostility to a man who is reaching those same young men with a message of hard work, personal responsibility, honor, and integrity?

After all, if you’re a theologically conservative Christian or Jew — a person who is Biblically literate and strives to live according to Biblical morality — the flaw of the Peterson message is that it feels a bit basic. As I wrote in my review, “readers who are already grounded in a Biblical worldview will find some of the counsel extraordinarily elementary.”

But that’s the issue. If Peterson were writing to a Christian audience, he’d be one voice among many. An interesting and quirky voice, to be sure, but his core message about men and women would be conventional, not revelatory. Instead, however, Peterson stands out because he is playing in the Left’s cultural sandbox. He’s disrupting an emerging secular cultural monopoly with arguments about history, tradition, and the deep truths about human nature that the cultural radicals had long thought they’d banished to the fringe.

That’s the reason for the fury. That’s the reason for the rage. When Peterson walks into a secular university or a secular television studio and addresses a secular audience by referencing ancient theological arguments, the effect is not unlike inviting a genderqueer women’s-studies professor to a Baptist Sunday-school class. Some things (in some places) are just not said.

Then, when people actually respond to that message, the shock is even more seismic. It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the Left has long been (and, crucially, felt) culturally ascendant in America’s secular spaces. The academy, pop culture, mainstream media, corporate America — all of these spaces have drunk deeply of the Left’s cultural Kool-Aid, especially when it comes to matters of sex and gender. The holdouts are in the church and synagogue, and their borders are shrinking under relentless cultural assault.

That’s the arc of history, you see, and the only place where its ultimate triumph was in doubt (or, more precisely, delayed) was in politics — and those setbacks were transient and temporary until the “coalition of the ascendant” could claim its rightful place at the pinnacle of political power.

The problem, however, was a failure to thrive. The new culture left too many young men behind. The new, fractured family claimed too many lives. When “deaths of despair” are so prevalent that the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation now faces declining life expectancies, it’s hard to argue for the unqualified success of the modern leftist cultural project.

And so, as the secular Left pressed up against the church, it looked behind and saw the flames in its own camp. Peterson held the match, but the kindling was all around him. It’s not that men (and many women) failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to recognize our fundamental human nature. As Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “We cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls.”

No one should believe that Peterson is always right, or that his every utterance is profound, but he has served a truly invaluable cultural service. His success and — critically — his method, which relies as much on scripture as it does on psychology, should serve as a clarion call for Biblical Christians and Jews. There is no need for the defensive crouch. In the spiritual wasteland of secularized America, the harvest is plentiful, and ancient truth can indeed provide the seed for new beginnings.