The Man They Couldn t Cancel – WSJ

Why has the political left taken a severe dislike to him? A lot of my popularity derives from YouTube, he says in a phone interview, and YouTube skewed hard male for a long time, and is still mostly male. My typical audience would probably be between 60/40 and 70/30 men to women. There s nothing conspiratorial about that, and it wasn t because I was talking specifically to young men. It might be that they re more desperate for what I m saying.

The stereotypical Peterson fan, it s probably fair to say, is a young white male whose life lacked structure and discipline but heard Mr. Peterson s lectures and began to reorder his life. Mr. Peterson insists, though, that his critics caricature his audience for their own ends. There s this hypothetical group that I m helping, he says: angry, alienated, disenfranchised white-supremacist young males. First of all, that s a lie. Second, even if it is disenfranchised young males who are primarily responding to what I m saying, is there really something wrong with me talking to them? Are they so beneath contempt that they don t deserve anyone s attention?

Those who despise Mr. Peterson think of him as a member of the right or even the far right. I wouldn t describe him as a conservative his interest lies in individual rather than societal order, and he says little about public policy. But it s true that he not infrequently winds up holding conservative viewpoints on cultural matters. In Beyond Order, for example, he makes the case for marriage over cohabitation and readily acknowledges that children do better in two-parent families than in single-parent ones. He also writes and speaks frequently on the differences between masculinity and femininity.

via www.wsj.com

Jordan Peterson is hated by all the right people.