Ep. 409 dissects the Putin-Clinton uranium deal conspiracy, alleging FBI cover-ups and Mueller’s potential immunity, before pivoting to Foulos Saipov’s Islamist attack—contrasting it with white supremacist and antifa violence as equally destructive ideologies. Jordan Peterson defends his opposition to Canada’s Bill C-16, warning of forced pronoun compliance penalties, while framing the backlash as a free-speech victory. The episode ties these threads to broader critiques: leftist authoritarianism, biblical psychology (logos and sacrifice), and Trump’s mixed legacy—executive wins amid rhetorical flaws—culminating in a defense of Judeo-Christian values against secular decline. [Automatically generated summary]
The Democrat-Russian collusion story is now so incredible it would take an insane conspiracy theorist to believe it, even though it's true.
The connections are so complex that in order to explain it, we'd need three whiteboards and a paranoid crazy man babbling wildly and drawing lines with a magic marker all over the place while his face turned red and his eyes got as wide as saucers.
Fortunately, we have all that on hand.
The conspiracy begins with Vladimir Putin funneling millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation in order to win approval from the State Department run by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Russian takeover of some uranium supplies used by Americans.
The FBI, run by Robert Mueller, knew of the bribery but covered it up to keep from embarrassing the Obama administration, which wanted to keep Putin happy so he'd sign off on the deal with Iran to ensure Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons until 10 minutes after Obama left office and couldn't be blamed for them.
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, she and the Democrats used the law firm Perkins Co. to hire the firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who in turn went to agents of Vladimir Putin, who gave him unsubstantiated dirt on Hillary's opponent, Donald Trump, in what is now called the Steele dossier.
When Hillary Clinton lost the election to Trump, she and the Democrats stopped colluding with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election and began accusing Trump of having colluded with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election.
They said the Russians had hacked the DNC's emails, but no one saw the hacked computers except CrowdStrike, a company hired by Perkins Co., who had hired Fusion GPS, who had hired Christopher Steele, who had gotten information from the Russians.
The FBI, meanwhile, was now being run by Robert Mueller's friend, James Comey, who brought the Steele dossier to Trump and Obama, thus ensuring the dossier would be released by the news media and the media would accuse Trump of being in league with the Russians by using the dossier Hillary Clinton had acquired by being in league with the Russians.
Comey also confirmed that the DNC emails had been hacked by the Russians to try to elect Donald Trump, even though his only source was the company that had been hired by the Democrat law firm that had colluded with the Russians to try to elect Hillary Clinton.
At this point, Trump fired Comey, who then illegally leaked his memos to the press in order to inspire an investigation into Russian misdeeds by his friend Robert Mueller, who had covered up Russian misdeeds.
Mueller has now offered himself immunity in order to get himself to talk.
In short, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats accused Donald Trump of doing what they had done and then got the people who helped them do it to investigate whether Trump had done what they had actually done and then covered up so they could accuse Trump of doing what they had actually done.
Stay Tuned00:05:36
I know, it's complicated, but I'm sure the whole plot will come out when the people who did it are finished investigating themselves.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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But it can be delayed.
It can be delayed if you listen to Another Kingdom.
Michael Knowles and I have this wonderful serial story podcast about a Hollywood schlub, basically, who walks through a door and finds himself a murder suspect in a bizarre fantasy world.
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All right.
We have an excellent interview today with Jordan Peterson.
You remember Jordan Peterson?
He is the Toronto professor who's fighting for free speech in Canada.
And we taped this a little earlier.
But the first five minutes of it or so, it's about 15 minutes long.
And the first five minutes or so, I was talking to him about free speech and this bill he's been fighting that wants to force people to have to use certain pronouns for transgender people and all this stuff.
But after that, we got into a conversation about faith because he's kind of like on this path where he's exploring this thing in his Bible videos and stuff.
It was really, I mean, I was starting to sweat.
It was a very intense interview.
So I hope you'll stay tuned for that.
We can stay on.
We can stay on.
Yeah, we'll stay on.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe.
You should subscribe because that's how we pay Austin whatever little bittens we pay him.
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But it only costs you 10 lousy bucks a month, and then you can be in the mailbag and you can watch the whole show on our website.
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So please do that, but we will stay on because this Jordan Peterson thing is really worth watching.
By the way, other people might be wondering.
We got a lot of flack for not having the monologue.
And the thing about the monologue was some people didn't like it, some people did, and all this stuff, but it was just getting to be too much.
I mean, it was doing four of those a week.
When you see monologues on television, this is serious.
That's 20 writers working all day long.
When you see my monologue, that's me working all day long.
It was just getting to be too much.
So we're going to try and do one a week on Thursdays if the news doesn't take us away.
And that will also give us time to do them more elaborately with more background animation and stuff like that.
What else?
Oh, I have to say congratulations to the Astros because we're here in LA and the Astros won.
And I'm a Yankees fan because I grew up in New York.
And, you know, so I was not, you know, I kind of was rooting for the Dodgers, but I couldn't help thinking Houston had such a lousy year with the hurricane and everything that they kind of needed it.
And we, you know, we'll always have Harvey Weinstein.
So we'll always be the champion in terms of sexual predatation and, you know, predation and all this stuff.
You can have your lousy world series.
We'll be abusing women.
And that's the important thing.
And children.
Anyway, whatever you're doing, we want you to look great doing it.
And go ahead, take a moment, take a look in the mirror.
Right.
Now you know why we're telling you about this.
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And you will look so much better than you do with stuff you just go in and pull off the rack.
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Bespoke, they call it in England.
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Tax Cuts for the Rich00:02:58
It's an incredible deal for a suit that will fit you better than anything off the rack ever could.
So, you know, they just released the tax, the tax proposal, the Democrat tax proposal.
And I always kind of want to wait.
You know, I want to take a look at this and these things are so complicated.
I have to say, on first glance, on first glance, look at it.
It looks great.
I was really stunned.
They're looking for the biggest transformation of the U.S. tax code I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal in more than 30 years.
They aim to permanently chop the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%.
And that's going to be really interesting because you're going to hear the Democrats, what do they always do?
Oh, they're giving tax cuts to the rich.
It's tax cuts to the rich.
But we have like one of the highest, if not the highest, corporate tax rates.
And that's insane because the corporations are where all the jobs come from, all the products come from.
And this is a great, if they get away with this, if they can push this through, it will turn this economy into a juggernaut the way it's supposed to be because it's the American economy.
What else are they going to do?
They're going to compress the number of individual income tax brackets, repeal the taxes paid by largest states.
Starting in 2024, they're going to repeal deductions for state and local income and sales taxes.
You're going to get a lot of pushback on that from states like this one, California.
And there'll be a deduction for property taxes, but caps it at $10,000.
And that limit applies to married filers and individuals.
And what else?
To partly offset the lost revenue, Republicans plan to curtail the deductions individuals take for state and local tax payments and the ones businesses get for the interest they pay on debt.
They're going to leave the top individual rate at 39.6%, but they're going to push the income threshold for that to $1 million for married couples.
So Austin, that's going to affect you, but those of us not making $1 million a year that, you know, we won't care.
$1 million off that $500.
It piles up.
It's compound interest.
That's what it does.
It's the magic of compound interest.
So, you know, we're going to step back, and what we're going to see is, of course, the Democrats saying it's tax cuts for the rich.
And suddenly, which I love, is suddenly the Democrats are going to worry about the deficit.
How are we going to pay?
How are we going to pay for these tax cuts?
And I have an answer for that.
The truth is, the truth is, if you cut the taxes a little bit, the growth in the economy, the speed of the growth of the economy will create so much more revenue that it will help pay that off.
But my answer to this is, it's my money.
It's not your money.
So just stop spending it, and that'll help pay for the fact that you're taking my money.
Like, stop taking, it's just stop taking my money and then only spend, you know, a reasonable amount of money, and then you won't have to ask yourself how to pay for it.
And of course, on the Democrat side, the idea is never, ever, ever, ever.
We are clinging to every single dollar we have.
So we're going to let that develop.
I'm going to have a chance to read it.
It was being released as I was leaving my house.
Ideas Matter00:09:38
And then I was driving and my tires started to go flat.
And I just thought, I'm not going to come in and do a detailed thing.
But it looks good.
And if Trump, I don't know.
If Trump pulls this off, they're going to have a very hard time.
I'll talk about this in a minute, the complexities of Donald Trump.
But it is really something the stuff he has accomplished without Congress.
And if Congress starts to pitch in, it would really be different.
And if they don't pitch in, they're going to be gone.
So I think they're really motivated.
I mean, if Republicans can't cut taxes, if Republicans can't cut taxes, what can they do?
I mean, they can play golf.
That's it.
That's what Republicans do.
They play golf and cut taxes, right?
I mean, so it's like, they're going to have to run on playing golf, which I want to actually see that campaign.
It's like, elect this senator, he plays golf.
I don't think that's going to work.
You've got to cut the taxes, too, that goes with the playing golf.
Anyway, I want to take a step back.
You know, after this terrorist attack in New York yesterday, watching the kind of hilarious coverage, and I don't mean hilarious in the sense that people died, which obviously wasn't hilarious, just the stupidity of the coverage.
I just wanted to take a step back.
You know, they put this guy, say, Foulos Saipov, is that how you pronounce it?
Yeah, who cares?
They put the complaint out against him.
And in the complaint, it says in interviews with law enforcement officials, Mr. Saipov said he felt good about what he had done, killing eight people and wounding so many people.
And he asked to display an Islamic state flag in his hotel room.
And, you know, I think they should let him, and I know where they can plant the flagpole, too.
You know, great idea.
But, you know, you hear that, and you know, at the same time, I mean, I'm being snarky about it because of otherwise I just have to go there and strangle him myself.
But like, I'm being snarky about it.
But, you know, you know that people are mourning today.
People have lost, you know, somebody who went off.
A lot of these guys were from Argentina who were killed.
You know, people who went off on a holiday and they're not coming back.
And this guy's happy.
You know, he's a happy guy, which is evil.
I mean, this is evil.
And, you know, I was thinking about these philosophies because it's easy to focus on when it's an Islamist attack.
It's easy to focus on that.
But you think about all these philosophies, Islamism, radical Islam, we'll call it.
And I know there are a lot of people who say it's all Islam.
And I was talking yesterday about all Islam, but the guys who do this stuff are radical Islamists.
And you think about that, and you think about these white supremacists who the guy in Charlottesville drove a car into an innocent woman.
It's basically a Nazi.
You think about these antifa people who the press treats easily because they agree with their basic premises.
But you know, you're putting on masks and you're beating people up because you disagree with them.
You're a fascist.
So you can call yourself anti-fascist, but you're a fascist.
You're an anti-fascist fascist.
And all of them basically have one thing in common, which is the premise that what they are offering, the world that they are offering, and the world that they are defending is so superb, is so perfect, is so paradisical, that it is worth killing you or beating you or just smushing you, crushing you in some way to ensure that that world comes into being.
And it's a child's view of the world.
I mean, I think all of us have this.
I mean, have you ever had the fantasy?
I've had the fantasy where you get godlike powers and then what would you do to the world?
I always end up killing people.
I always end up killing people.
I always think, well, first they have to erase those guys because they're the problem.
Because, you know, when you're fantasizing, you're kind of tapping into that childlike thing.
And I really do believe that the media and the left, I know there are childlike thinkers on the right, but I think on the left, because they own so much of the communication machinery in this country, including the academies, including show business, including the news business, that they make us, they turn us into children the way they talk about things.
So it's always, you know, and why do they do it?
It's always their philosophy versus hate.
So you are for gay marriage or you hate gay people.
There's no complex idea about the role of marriage in society.
Never mind any of that.
You're either for the government controlling all the energy supplies or you want everybody to die.
You know, that's always the thing where the Republicans just want people to die.
You're either for government-run health care, you want all of your healthcare controlled by the government so the government has the power of life and death over you, has the power to make decisions about how you behave, or you just want people to die.
You want little children like Jimmy, you want to see Jimmy Kimmel crying and the little children, pardon me, who can't get health care.
You know, so they reduce the arguments to childlike arguments.
And why do they do this?
I seriously believe it's not just because they believe your children.
They do believe your children.
But I seriously think that one of the things about the left is their essential philosophy has failed.
Their essential socialist philosophy failed with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And I know that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, a lot of the left had disowned it because of Stalin, but they bought into it in the first place.
The New York Times is still running this series, Red Century, in which they tell you how much better things were in these murder.
I mean, this is a philosophy that has resulted in at least 100 million deaths.
100 million deaths, probably closer to 150 million deaths.
Why?
Because the world that they're offering, the socialist world that they're offering, is so wonderful, so perfect, so paradisical, that it is worth what's a few farmers being starved, what's a few people being shot in the back of the head.
You know, that's a small price to pay for this perfect world they're bringing in.
And that philosophy has failed, and we saw it fail our entire last century was just that philosophy failing.
We see it failing now in South America.
Everywhere it goes, it failed.
And all they can do is point to this magical Scandinavia that they make up, which, by the way, has repealed most of its socialist measures.
What they do have, some of them, they have very high taxes.
They have free markets, but then when you make a lot of money off their free markets or off the oil they, in the case of Norway, off their oil, they tax you very highly so they have a lot of services and goods and vacations and things like that.
And of course, all those communities are very homogenous.
They're all the same.
I mean, people tend to, in those communities, tend to all have the same values, same backgrounds, same bloodlines and all this stuff.
And they're all protected by the evil capitalists here in the United States, because without the United States military, every single one of them would be part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Every single one of them would have been conquered at some point by a mightier, more imperialistic power than ours if we hadn't protected them.
So we're spending the money that protects them.
We're often spending the money on research and development that develops new drugs that they don't pay for, that we pay for with our high drug prices.
So it really is not a fair system because we are taking on a lot of the responsibilities and then they complain about the fact that we are not socialist like they are.
Socialism has failed everywhere and so all that they're left with is grouping us into these identities, is identity politics, grouping it, you know, you're black and therefore your interests have to do with your blackness.
You're Islamic, therefore your interests have to do with not having people criticize radical Islam.
You're a woman and therefore you're against men.
All it has to do is put pitting us against one another.
The left doesn't want this country to be more what they call diverse, which is they don't want us to have more different colored faces because they love mankind.
They want us to be more diverse so there are more interest groups that they can turn against each other to keep us from noticing that their policies have failed.
And so when you have a policy that fails, all you can sell is this hatred.
And in order to get that hatred going, you need simplicity.
You've got to pit the blacks against the cops.
Nobody ever says, well, wait, wait.
Yeah, maybe there's a bad cop in your neighborhood.
Maybe the cops are, there's some bigoted cops in your neighborhood, but who's protecting you?
When the crime comes down, when your kids are gangsters, when you've got gangsters on the street, who's going to protect you from those people?
Nobody wants to have those kind of conversations.
And when it comes to Islam, that is the problem.
Listen, it is dangerous to start attacking people's religions.
It is dangerous to start criticizing people's religions.
All through the Middle Ages with the Jews, you know, there were a lot of people before it became a racial issue.
It was a religious issue.
It was that the Jews didn't, you know, it's like Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
The Jews don't have mercy, they just stick to the law.
And we wonderful Christians, we have mercy and we rise above the law, which of course, you know, we're all people.
We all suck.
You know, we're all sinful people.
So it's like there's nothing to that.
And it's also a simplistic, stupid view of Judaism.
But it can be very, very dangerous to criticize people's religions because most people in a religion just want to pray.
They want to have a communion with God.
And they're not blowing people up.
They're not doing that stuff.
But, but, on the other hand, this is complexity.
This is how complexity works.
On the other hand, ideas matter.
If ideas matter, why are we, you know, if ideas don't matter, why are we doing this?
Why are we talking?
Why are we listening?
Why are we reading?
Why are we thinking if ideas don't matter?
Of course they matter.
This country is built on ideas.
And you do have to question, even though we believe so deeply in freedom of religion and multiplicity of religion and diversity of religion, even though we believe in all those things, you do have to question whether a series of ideas is antithetical to the creed of your nation.
Why Ideas Matter00:03:44
You know, this is the thing.
So, and, you know, so all of this stuff is complex.
I always like to use the gay issue because I'm kind of on the left about this.
I believe everybody should be left alone.
You know, I think that everybody should be left alone.
I think a government that can bother you in your bedroom is too strong a government.
But I understand when people talk about marriage.
I think that's a reasonable argument.
And I think two people should be able to sit down and talk about that without their businesses being attacked, without their ideas.
You know, Clarence Thomas, Laura Ingram, has her new show on Fox.
And congratulations to her.
Laura has been incredibly nice to me over the years.
I have a very funny story about my first interview I gave with Laura Ingram.
Should I tell that?
Yeah, why not?
Just a quick diversion.
You know, I had just managed to try to convince the people in New York that I could sell books to conservatives by getting on conservative radio and on TV.
And at one point, I said to one of my agents, who was one of the smartest women I ever met in the business, I would learn something from her every time I talked to her.
And I said to her, I think I can get on Hannity.
And she said, who's Hannity?
And this is, I mean, this is recently.
This is not long ago.
And so that's the mindset of the publishing business back then, and you couldn't get through to them.
And so I met Laura Ingram at a party at Joel, the guy who did 24.
It was at the 24 studios.
Joe, not Joe, Joel, oh my gosh.
But it'll come back to me.
But they had a party there, and I met Laura and she said, why don't you come on my show and talk about your book and we'll try and sell your book.
And I said, great.
And I was so excited.
I was so excited that I actually lost my voice.
I got like laryngitis because it was not just the interview that I was happy about.
It was that I could finally convince the people in New York that people like Laura could sell my book.
And Laura is a very, like I said, she's been lovely to me, but she's very brusque.
You know, she can talk very tough and all this stuff.
So I get on and I start to, I was selling, I think it was Dynamite Road, one of my detective stories, and I'm selling it to her, and I'm on the phone with her, and I'm doing this interview.
And the build-up to the interview was tough.
Getting there was tough.
I had to get my voice back.
I had to score some antibiotics so I could get over my larynge.
It was a big deal.
So now I'm on this interview.
And I'm doing the interview and I start talking.
And I say, you know, I keep doing what they tell you to do when you do an interview, which is keep mentioning the name of the book.
And I got about two minutes into this interview, and they broke for a commercial.
And Laura came on and she said, stop mentioning the name of the book.
You sound like a used car salesman.
And I was so terrified.
I just was like, okay, okay.
And I kind of stumbled through the rest of the interview.
The book went up the list on Amazon.
And I actually did convince the people.
It actually worked.
I convinced the people in New York that this was an important thing, and it really changed my relationship with them and with the meeting.
Anyway, anyway, Laura Ingram had Clarence, I thought that was funny.
When Laura Ingram yells at you, she really yells at you.
So she had Clarence Thomas, big score, she got because Justice Thomas doesn't like going on.
And he was talking about the fact that we have lost the idea of multiplicity of ideas.
And let's play this cut.
This is the cut about the number 15, cut 15.
I grew up at a time when I was exposed to just wonderful range of ideas in a segregated library, in a black library, the Carnegie Library in Savannah.
I mean, you might read George Schuyler and the Pittsburgh Courier.
You might read a book by Ralph Ellison or Baldwin, or you might read one by Richard Wright.
Range Of Ideas00:14:24
So you might read something about Booker T. Washington, but then W.B. Du Bois.
So you had this range of ideas.
And I think we're getting quite comfortable in our society limiting ideas and exposure to ideas.
And maybe that's a symptom of it.
I don't know.
But I don't think it's good for the next generation and the people who will be learning.
I mean, I think I learned tremendous amount in the Carnegie Library simply from being exposed to a range of ideas.
You know, it's just an important point because when you look at, for instance, on the right, let's pick on the right for a minute.
When you look at Donald Trump, Donald Trump does a lot of stuff, as I keep saying, that I don't like.
And every time I mention the fact that he does stuff I don't like, I don't think the president should be bullying people.
I don't think he should be calling them names.
I think that is a moral hazard.
Yet he's accomplishing so much, so much good stuff.
If he gets this tax thing, I mean, you know, wiping out ISIS, getting rid of regulations, the judges he's appointing, all this stuff.
It's complicated.
You know, it's complicated.
And every time I say, well, it's complicated.
He sometimes doesn't do the right thing.
And I want to criticize him for that because I do not want to sign on to it.
People yell at me, but it's complicated.
Life is complicated.
And then there's the other guys, the Never Trumpers on the right, who every time I point out what he's doing, they say, well, he's not responsible for that.
He didn't defeat ISIS.
It's like, yes, he did.
He gave Mattis, Mattis himself said he gave him the go-ahead to destroy them.
And they did destroy them.
And I think that this is like, you know, you can't take the credit away from the guy.
And you do have to point out the things that he does that would kind of can soil the rest of us.
I mean, life is complicated.
So with this religion thing, it's look, I don't want to bother Muslim people, obviously, peaceful Muslim people.
I don't want to bother them.
But I think when Trump is talking about immigration, he's right.
And you can't just say, well, freedom of religion, freedom of religion.
If they believed in human sacrifice, we wouldn't let them in.
And if they believe that in Sharia law, we shouldn't let them in.
Those are two things that are antithetical to our way of life.
It's not the Obama thing, who we are.
We're the same as everybody else.
It's nothing about who we are.
It's what we believe.
Because what we believe ultimately is what fashions our society.
And so we need complex adult conversations.
And I think the press cuts us off from that.
I'm running out of time because I got to do this interview.
So let us go to Jordan Peterson.
And like I said, terrific, really interesting interview.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and also a heroic battler for free speech.
He's the author of Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, and 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos, and the host of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast and the YouTube channel where he has some tremendous videos of Jordan Peterson videos.
Dr. Peterson, thank you for coming back.
It's good to see you again.
Good to see you, too.
Can you bring us up to date on this battle you've been having?
Is it Bill C-16?
Many people probably have lost this plot, and I just would like to know what the latest is on this.
If you could remind us what the bill is first.
Bill C-16 was a measure, a federal measure, that purported only to extend basic human rights protection to people who varied in their gender identity and their gender expression.
But the problem I had with it was the background policy information that accompanied it, especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, that seemed to indicate that addressing people by their preferred pronouns would be mandatory, along with another number of other, what would you call, policy recommendations that I thought were serious infringements on freedom of speech and freedom of thought and conscience.
And so that became a big story in Canada.
And I went with a couple of other people to testify before the Canadian Senate against the bill, but it passed.
It passed through the Senate and will be legislation in Canada, as it already is in many provinces.
So we lost that.
Does that mean there will now be penalties for not calling a man she if he decides he's a woman?
Well, not only that, the penalties are there if you use non-standard pronouns, you know, like Z and Zer and these made-up pronouns that no one except for a very tiny minority of people use in common language.
And that was another reason I objected to it, because I think of these, what would you call, constructed pronouns as the vanguard of a particular kind of radical left-wing authoritarianism, in my view.
And that was my primary reason for refusing, stating publicly that I would refuse to use them, especially when they're mandated.
There's never been a law in Canada like that where you were compelled to use certain words by the government.
Will you refuse to use them?
Yes, definitely.
And do you know what the penalty for that is?
No, they've not really specified that.
I mean, what would happen is you would end up dragged before the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
And that's, I would say, an extrajudicial kangaroo court.
And they would make their decision there.
And that could, there's all sorts of potential penalties that might be assessed, financial, forced educational retraining, potential loss of professional status.
And then if you refuse to comply with the recommendations of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, if you reject them, then they can bring you into normal court and use whatever punishments are available under the normal court system.
Has your stance interfered with your teaching career, your work?
Well, you know, the university was pretty ambivalent about what I was doing to begin with.
And they sent me two letters asking me to stop saying what I was saying.
I think they were as confused by the new legislation, which also applies to the province as I was.
And they certainly didn't expect the sort of backlash against what I was saying.
But I would say the University of Toronto has actually come around pretty good since then.
I've received a lot of popular support, especially from journalists, because they're also obviously concerned about free speech.
And I think once the university sorted itself out in some sense, then they decided it would be best just to leave me alone.
Or I wouldn't say they're supporting me precisely in my stance.
You know what I mean, because you're not going to do that.
But they definitely have pulled away from any potential censoring of me.
And I taught again in January, and the students were very welcoming.
So I think that's been straightened out quite nicely.
And I think the University of Toronto is moving in the direction of the University of Chicago with regards to protection of free speech and the primacy of classic liberal values over social justice.
That's what it looks like.
I'm sure hoping that's the case.
So you've lost a battle, but the war goes on, and you may actually win that in the long run.
Well, and it raised a lot of public opinion.
I mean, so although we lost the battle with regards to that specific legislation, it certainly doesn't seem like the war was wrong.
Quite the contrary.
I mean, one of the things it's done is bring the other work I've done on ideology and personal responsibility to a huge audience.
And so that's been completely overwhelming, but also, well, extraordinarily fortunate and beneficial for me.
So I can't say that the net outcome was negative by any stretch of the imagination.
And there are more and more people, including academics, who are starting to push back against the domination of the universities by these postmodern Marxist ideologues.
So it's gone too far, and virtually anyone sensible can see that.
So maybe it'll be receding.
You never know.
So now, here's another subject that I really want to talk to you about.
You have got a series of videos on the Bible.
And I have to tell you that a young man in Australia wrote a Facebook post and then did a video in which he said, Jordan Peterson has been my gateway drug to Christianity.
He started by listening to you and he ended up, the poor man, reading my book and then had a conversion experience.
What are you teaching these poor people that leads them down the primrose path to me of all things?
And what are you saying about the Bible?
Well, I've studied mythology and symbolism for a very long time.
And the first book I wrote, and to some degree the second one, which is 12 Rules for Life, deals a lot with the psychological significance of mythological stories.
Now, I'm not necessarily speaking specifically about the religious significance because I'm not, well, I wouldn't say that's my primary area of expertise because I'm a psychologist.
But I started this biblical series, which is on YouTube.
I've done 12 lectures, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through Genesis.
I'm trying to make a case for the ethos that's laid out in the narrative structure of the Old Testament and then eventually the New Testament.
And what I'm arguing for is the importance of the idea of logos that saturates the biblical texts.
And logos is the power of communicative speech.
And it's given a world-shaping form in the biblical story.
So God, for example, creates order out of chaos at the beginning of time with speech.
And that speech, that communicative, honest, truthful speech, is also associated with the figure of Christ, who's the redemptive figure.
And so from a psychological perspective, one of the ideas that's being put forth is that human beings who are made in the image of God, let's say, participate in the process of creation in a positive way when they use truthful, responsible speech, because that shapes the potential that's in front of us towards the good instead of towards hell, essentially.
And so that's the case I've been making.
And that idea emerged out of an underlying narrative structure, right?
It wasn't explicit and philosophical to begin with.
It was acted out in drama and ritual.
I also talk a fair bit about the idea of sacrifice, which is a big concept, a major concept in the Old Testament.
And from a psychological perspective, the significance of sacrifice is absolutely overwhelming because to discover sacrifice is to learn that you can give up something of value in the present and gain something of greater value in the future.
And that's really the discovery of the future, and it's the discover of responsibility and of reputation and all of those things.
So the whole idea that you could alter your behavior in the present in a conscious manner so that you could make a bargain with nature, fate, and mankind was embedded in the idea of sacrifice.
And that's something that's worth thinking about for like 10 years.
It's an unbelievably, unbelievably brilliant realization, and it's something that's only really characteristic of people.
You know, a while back, I noticed that I started to read a lot of books by intellectuals and professors that made the following.
I'm thinking of books like Education's End by Anthony Cronman over at Yale and Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians by Marcelo Perra, I think he was a senator in Italy, and Whatever Happened to Modernism by a terrific critic, Gabriel Giosopovici.
And all of them started to make the same case from different places.
But the case was basically this, that Christianity is the underpinning of our, or Judeo-Christianity, if you like, is the underpinning of our civilization.
Without it, our civilization would collapse.
But, but they couldn't quite grasp the nettle of belief themselves.
And when I listen to some of your videos, I sort of hear that same position.
Am I right in that or am I making a mistake?
Well, elaborate a bit more.
You mean with regards to like explicit belief in God?
Yes, explicit.
Belief in God and in Christ, in Christianity specifically, I think.
Well, I think it depends on what you mean by belief, at least in my case.
And I wouldn't say that I've necessarily got that completely sorted out in my own mind, which is partly why I'm doing these lectures.
Like, I'm doing the lectures to figure out what I think.
So, you know, I'm figuring it out as I go along, essentially.
I'm doing a lot of background research.
And I'm also trying to restrict my commentary to what I regard as psychologically valid rather than theologically relevant.
So I'm not denying the possibility of meaning in these biblical texts beyond the psychological.
But I don't feel that I have the expertise to comment on it beyond that.
Now, I do know, and I have made this case, the case that human beings are capable of profound religious experience and that we even know how to induce those experiences is overwhelming.
And I don't know that, I don't know of any of the modern atheist types, for example, who've been able to explain that.
So it's a very difficult thing to explain.
And there's common patterns of religious experience across cultures.
And generally, the scientific findings are that people who have profound religious experiences, which can be invoked, for example, by pharmacological means upon occasion, benefit extraordinarily from those experiences.
So you can't make a straight scientific case that's anti-deist.
Although you can say, you know, the thing is, is you can't prove by the mere fact that people are capable of religious experiences that God necessarily exists, right?
Because those experiences are subjective.
So, but you certainly have to proceed with the observation that the religious experience is built into human beings at a very deep level, even at an evolutionary level, which is part of the case that I'm making in this biblical series, because I'm also trying to bridge the gap between evolutionary theory and religious thinking.
Religious Experiences Built Into Human Nature00:06:49
That needs to be done.
I mean, the Catholics have already sorted that out to some degree, but the evangelicals haven't to the same degree.
But I mean, the thing about the induced experience, which I think is always a really interesting point, we are capable of, for instance, experiencing that it is raining.
And I have no doubt that some clever scientists could induce the experience that it is raining in us.
But the question of faith is whether or not it is actually raining, whether or not you believe it is actually raining.
So, I mean, I think that the question of faith is the question of whether that religious experience refers to anything in reality.
And I have to say, and I hope this doesn't come across in the wrong way.
I'm not a preacher and I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything.
I saw a video of you where you were asked directly, do you believe in God?
And you sounded so much like me about three years before I was baptized that it almost made me laugh because you wanted to sort of keep it in the realm of ideas, and yet there is this question, and it's a powerful question for intellectuals like yourself, because I think that if intellectuals ultimately feel that they can't believe, then I feel that there's no trickle down to everybody else.
There's no intellectual foundation for faith, then basically there will be no faith.
So it's actually an important question.
Well, it is an important question, and I've got two things to say about that.
One, there's elements of that question that affect me in a private manner, in a way that makes me unwilling to respond because I'm not sure that my response and the question would be on the same plane of meaning, so to speak.
And, you know, it's easy to say that I'm weaseling out of it, but I've learned to not say things when there's something inside me that says not to say them.
And so that's one realm.
But the other thing I would say is that I think that it's more reasonable to consider what someone believes in terms of how they act.
And I certainly act as if there's a, or I do my best, I should qualify that, I do my best to act as if there's like a sovereign moral entity that's at the root of being.
And I think even if that's only true in a psychological sense, that doesn't make it trivial by any stretch of the imagination.
That was part of Carl Jung's observation, you know, because he thought of internal psychological unity, psychological and physiological unity, so the unified mind in a unified body as something that was an approximation to the self and also to Christ, which I think is an extraordinarily interesting idea because from a psychological perspective, you can think of Christ as the perfect man.
Now, he's also represented as a union of divine and human, but I think that people are a strange union of divine and human.
And the divine part is part of the fact that we have this capacity for religious experience and for transcendent experience, and that we're actually conscious and that our consciousness seems to have a world-creating form.
And so, and those are all things I'm certain of.
They seem very, very solid.
Now, what exactly that implies, I can't say because I can't understand it.
You know, there is an indescribable relationship as far as I'm concerned between consciousness and being.
And I don't think that materialist reductionists have dealt with that issue at all.
Now, there's serious philosophers who have, like Heidegger, for example, and serious psychologists like Jung who've also dealt with it.
But we have no idea, for example, how the brain produces consciousness.
And we have no idea what the relationship is between consciousness and being itself.
And it's something that even perplexes the physicists.
So.
You know, unfortunately, I have to end.
I would talk to you for another hour gladly, but they're telling me to wrap up.
I think I really, and by the way, I don't think you're weaseling out, first of all, because I think your faith is nobody's business but your own.
And secondly, because I think you have to take every journey honestly.
And I really, I have to say, I think your stuff is great and you are journeying honestly.
I'd much rather see an honest man confront the questions than hear somebody just preach it from the book.
And I think it's terrific.
I hope you'll come back and talk about this more.
It's just a fascinating question to me, and it is fascinating to watch intellectuals grapple with what I think is the failure of relativism and the failure of postmodernity at some level.
Yeah, well, we are a Judeo-Christian culture, and if we don't understand the foundation on which we rest, then we're going to fall.
Absolutely.
That's what it looks like to me.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, thank you very much.
I hope you'll come back and we'll talk again.
My pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
Nice to see you again.
Bye-bye.
That was a really interesting interview.
I mean, it's really fascinating to watch a guy of that level grapple with questions of faith.
I think a lot of people are doing it behind the scenes.
And I think we're, I really do believe we are in the midst of an underground revolution in faith among the intellectuals.
And I think it will trickle down to the rest of us.
And I think that's a really good thing.
Everybody laughs at me when I say this.
They think it's only going to go one way, but it's not.
It's going to change.
It really is.
That's it.
That's it.
But stave off the Clavenless weekend for one more day.
Tomorrow, a new episode of Another Kingdom comes out.
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Today, John Nolte, the Noltenator himself, said he loved it and he tweeted out to these.
I know, I know.
I know.
It's been great.
All right, stuff I like.
You know, I don't like the fact that last week, I think it was Fats Domino died, one of the greatest, greatest American performers.
He basically invented rock and roll.
His first song, The Fat Man, is said to be the beginning of rock and roll.
He lived his whole life in the ninth ward of New Orleans.
You remember the ninth ward of New Orleans is where the flood, Katrina, wiped out.
He had to be rescued by a helicopter because he wouldn't leave his house.
Married to the same woman for like 60 years.
They had eight kids together.
Just a straightforward guy.
Elvis Presley said of him, Elvis Presley said, rock and roll was here a long time before I came along.
Nobody can sing that music like colored people.
Let's face it, I can't sing it like Fats Domino can.
I know that.
And he really did, was one of the first to bring that kind of music, black music essentially, to white audiences.
And here I just want to end the week with his appearance on the Ed Sullivan show.
For those of you who don't remember Ed Sullivan, he was one of the weirdest hosts.
He brought the Beatles over to America.
He was always one of the top shows there was.
He himself had zero personality.
And you'll see him introduce the great Fats Domino with one of his biggest hits.
It's Blueberry Hill.
Fats Domino's Blueberry Hills00:01:27
We'll see you next week.
Here is Fats Domino singing Blueberry Hills.
My thrill.
But all of those wonder would you be Oh, you wanna go.