Jordan Peterson Calmly DISMANTLES Student who called him a MORON

Interviewer: .. or my next question to be about Lafayette and so I thought I would read a couple of Facebook posts that certain students who are critical of you read in the lead-up to this event and just asked you to respond to them.

Peterson: okay.

Interviewer: So this is a student writing, Lafayette College I'm utterly disappointed that you're allowing this to take place on our Campus. I thought we went through this last semester, with Roaming Millenial. Inviting hateful speakers who make wildly unsubstantiated claims is not going to fly with the student body. I get it the mill series events are private and not endorsed by the college but you absolutely have the power to make a statement on this. The fact that you're not is an embarrassment to our community. If you believe this man is a legitimate source of knowledge because he has a degree in clinical psychology feel free to ask our psychology department faculty and Counseling Center staff about the validity of his claims, I'm certain they would not endorse this speaker. DO BETTER in all caps.

For those of you unfamiliar, Jordan Peterson is known for denouncing the Meetoo Movement claiming that women are in no way marginalized in the West arguing against the existence of, Gender-Neutral pronouns, arguing against gun control in the US and claiming that identity politics and social justice movements are part of a devious Marxist agenda.

And then another student responded and this is briefer, College conservatives know that if they bring in a speaker who was willing to blatantly insult a portion of the audience and the Libs get angry enough about this for good reason then they may get an Op-ed written about them in the New York Times. As a result there are a whole group of hacks like Milo and Peterson who get famous and invited purely for their promise to misgender trans students and advocate provocative but ultimately toothless arguments about social Darwinist race theory. What I'm saying is that you have every right to be pissed. Jordan Peterson is a harmful moron, but know that, but know that you being pissed is also a hundred percent at the point of why he was invited. He's not a conservative he's just a guy who's mildly racist enough to offend college liberals and therefore secure wins for the cultural right.

Peterson: Comparatively mild stuff, it's the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons so there's nothing in it that's that's not entirely predictable, that's that's one of the things you know, you notice when you're talking to peopl. If you want to find out whether the person is there or the ideology is there you listen to see if you're hearing anything that someone else of the same ideological mindset couldn't have told you. You know, like I've had thousands of conversations with people because I've spent 20 years as a clinical psychologist and one of the things I've learned about people is that they're unbelievably interesting if you get someone to sit down and you move past the superficial, which you can actually do quite rapidly they'll tell you all sorts of things that only they know that are unbelievably enlightening. About their own peculiar problems about the way they look at the world about their their idiosyncratic familial dynamics, like just fascinating personal stuff, it's the stuff of great novels you know and just this is ordinary people.

I don't really think there is an ordinary person exactly, there are the facade of ordinariness but behind that people are very rarely ordinary and so there the conversations are almost instantaneously fascinating and one of the one of the guidelines that I used in my clinical practice constantly was like I had this sense I probably learned this mostly from Carl Rogers was that. If the conversation wasn't really interesting then we weren't doing anything that was therapeutically useful but they're interesting, all of the interesting elements of it were were very very personal and so to replace this and I learned this mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his detailed analysis of what I would call ideological possession, he talked to people, he talked about people he met in the gulag camps who were under the sway of a rigid communist orthodoxy and noted very clearly that it was like there was a crank in some sense on the side of their head and you could just crank the crank and out would come the ideological dogma and it's all entirely predictable and people who are in a situation like that don't understand that they're possessed by an idea. Rights Carl Jung said people don't have ideas, ideas have people.

It's like so there's nothing in that that's anything other than exactly what you would predict and then there's a deeper issue too and this is one that I think has bedeviled me ever since I made my initial videos which is. It's impossible for those on the radical left to admit that anyone who opposes what they're doing might be reasonable, because what that would mean would be that you could be reasonable and opposed the radical left and that would imply that what the radical left was doing wasn't reasonable and so instead of dealing with the fact that I actually happened to be quite reasonable, the attempt is to assume that anyone who objects must be part of the radical right.

It's like well actually no, there's lots of space between the radical left and the radical right, there's the moderate reasonable left for example and then there's the center and then there's the moderate reasonable right and then there's the far right and then there's the extreme right, all of that exists in opposition to the radical left. But it's very convenient for the radicals on the left to say oh well you don't buy our doctrine and then to immediately make the presupposition that you must be the most heinous example of that entire array of potential objection (6:10)