Targeting Jordan Peterson

At The Tablet, Wesley Yang writes about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.

...Peterson is both an archetypal victim and beneficiary of these polarized times. In less than two years he has become, with the exception of the American president, perhaps the single most loathed person by the journalistic and intellectual classes in Canada and the United States. He has also become, by orders of magnitude, the most widely disseminated lecturer in the history of the world. He is the sole possessor of a personal platform many multiples the size of all his detractors combined. He does not rely on the gatekeepers of the progressive consensus for his livelihood; indeed he prospers precisely by flouting it. It was his very success in managing this feat at the outset that made it urgent to target him, thereby ramping up the cycle of escalation that has made his platform as enormous as it has become.

...that Peterson doesn’t actually hold the opinions ascribed to him doesn’t matter at all to the keepers of the social media consensus. They’ll just keep repeating false claims, based mainly on cherry-picked quote fragments and evidence-free assertions, until they harden into social fact, immune from correction or clarification.

We are living through a time of pervasive rhetorical overkill and genuine fear. In times of extremism, moderation itself can come to seem the greater enemy to those ideologically possessed.

...So what does Peterson actually believe? He has consistently defended the moral position that the “individual is sovereign over the group,” a unique feature of Anglo-American political theory and practice that holds that citizens hold their rights against the state rather than through it, which is inscribed into our founding documents, and helps to account for the remarkable capacity of societies built around its doctrines to accommodate high levels of diversity while remaining democratic. The underlying sovereignty of individuals forces state power to operate against a hard constraint that limits coercion, and gives individuals the means by which to push back.

Read more here.