My wife and I watched a full half hour of this interview together, and though she and I have both been fans of his lectures for some time, unlike my wife I've also been watching the occasional interview. The link you posted put into clearer focus a nagging problem I've been having over Peterson for some time now, and that is that he may be a potential cult leader in the making. I'm not saying he will be, but some foundations and factors are there for it: he has enormous charisma, he's completely self confident, he's highly intelligent, he clearly knows his discipline and is able to communicate it in a remarkably forthright and indisputable way, and most alarmingly to me, he's been able to attract an extremely large following in a short amount of time, and that following is beginning to resemble the Alt Right: mostly male, conservative, anti-feminist, and anti-politically correct.
This second interview supplied the missing puzzle piece when he lamented the deterioration of public discourse and then went on to use Antifa during Charlotte as his go-to example. Okay, Jordan, was there anybody else present at the Charlotte protest of any note? Anybody who might have attracted the attention of Antifa in the first place? Jordan doesn't say. And it wasn't just this interview. In every one I've seen online, the boogeymen are invariably the same: political correctness, Marxism, Communism, feminists, etc. All of the objective truths he espouses are undeniable and are easily applicable to our society as a whole, yet that scalpel of truth only seems to be applied, as he might say, to one specific ideological supposition, which if you understand the term is also a subtle pejorative. And it seems remarkably disingenuous or un-self aware to mourn the polarization of public discourse while consistently bashing one side. When criticizing the "polarization" of discourse, the implication is that both sides are engaging each other in an unreasonable and unproductive way, yet the examples he goes to in order to make his case are certainly not from both sides. It's not an accident that the posters most taken with Peterson in this thread are from the right wing of the aisle. And that's unfortunate, because there's no reason why Peterson's beliefs and conclusions need to be aimed in that direction alone.
For the record, based on listening to him I don't know if it's fair to say that Jordan Peterson himself is a right wing ideologue yet, but based on the highly focused topics he complains about, it shouldn't be surprising that that's the following he's disproportionately gathering.
