Now and then, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) mess with the wrong people. One of them is Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you haven’t heard of him, pay attention, because he will contribute to changing the culture.
Last year he was a respected but largely unknown professor at the University of Toronto. Then Canada passed an insane law which mandated that people by law can demand to be referred to by their preferred pronoun. Two of these pronouns were the made up words, zhe, and zher. To illustrate how crazy that is, imagine that someone identifies as the Queen of England, and demands by law that you refer to him as “Your Highness,” else you will go to jail.
Jordan Peterson injected himself into the public debate by stating publicly that the law violates freedom of speech and that he would not obey it. Immediately, SJWs started hate campaigns against him with their usual arsenal, calling him transphobic, racist and other slurs. And as usual, they tried to get him fired. At a speech that he held at McMaster University SJWs showed up and shut him down, chanting slurs and making noise.
The only problem with their inane campaigns was that it turned out that Jordan Peterson is brilliant. He is exceptionally articulate and has devoted his career as a psychologist to study precisely the philosophy and psychological pathology that underlies Social Justice Warriors. He has hundreds of hours of free psychology lectures on his YouTube channel that refutes everything that the SJW movement stands for.
The campaign backfired. Rather than silencing Peterson, they inadvertently alerted conservatives and libertarians all over the world about his existence. His videos spread like wildfire through social media, and his videos have now received more than fifty million views in about six months. Here is an excerpt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=458My4gvGDs
He launched a Patreon campaign to fund his activity, and he is now raising more than $40,000 per month from supporters all over the world. The funding campaign has secured his financial situation so that if he is fired from Toronto University for disobeying the crazy new Canadian law, he can continue his activity unabated.
One of the projects that he has pledged to use the money for is to try to create an online alternative to universities, which he regards as poisoned by neo-Marxism. He has already started that work by publishing all his lectures online free for anyone to view, and he has been able to fund a public lecture series on the Bible, which is currently unfolding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2w
Consequently, anyone can now access leading edge university material on psychology. Peterson intends to go much further than that, funding lectures from other fields and bringing to the forefront, those beacons of light that still exist in the academic world.
Peterson’s plan is essentially to starve the cancer that is destroying university. It’s a form of reverse platforming. He wants to organically defund schools that are destroying vulnerable young minds with post-modernist nonsense. If he succeeds, he could contribute to slaying the greatest dragon that is destroying America today – the leftist indoctrination machinery in academia.
Therefore, Jordan Peterson is a man to watch. He is a tour de force who will likely have a lasting imprint on academia and politics.
