The Megyn Kelly Show - Jordan Peterson on Pathological Masculinity, Alarming Political Gender Gap Among Young Voters, and Snow White | Ep. 1035
Episode Date: March 26, 2025Megyn Kelly is joined by Jordan Peterson, co-founder of Peterson Academy and author of "We Who Wrestle with God," to discuss the insane leftist policies that drove men and boys away from the Democrati...c party, how they’re still missing the point even after Trump’s landslide win, how it is "too little too late" for schools and universities to salvage their reputation, the decline of the Ivy League status, how young people are the more politically divided by gender than ever before, how Dems don’t understand why there's this split and still think everything is about abortion, Andrew Tate’s “pathological masculinity" and the wrong messenger to men and boys, why Dems are misguided about what makes Trump popular, what Olivia Wilde got wrong about him in the character based on him in “Don’t Worry Darling,” what Peterson learned about Chris Pine after the movie came out, how Disney dropped the ball on Snow White, challenges young women face in the dating world, the issue with the mentality of “settling,” and more.More from Peterson: https://petersonacademy.com/Herald Group: Learn more at https://GuardYourCard.com Done with Debt: https://www.DoneWithDebt.com & tell them Megyn sent you!FYSI: https://FYSI.com/Megyn or call 800-877-4000 Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we've got a treat for you
today with a guest who has not been on this show in nearly three years. He's only been here one other time, way back in April of 2021,
episode 84. I mean, that's a long time ago. We weren't even on video. It was just an audio
interview by phone. Jordan B. Peterson is a fascinating thinker and a leading intellectual
of our time. And there may not be a greater voice over the past decade speaking out
about the crisis with men and boys and more. Plus his home country is about to become our 51st state.
So that's exciting. He's Canadian. Most recently, I mean, he's sold 14 million books in the past
couple of years. It's pretty impressive. But most recently, he authored
We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine. And he's also the host of The Daily
Wires, the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, and founder of Peterson Academy, which I have to tell you,
I've spent a fair amount of time nosing around on and clicking on videos and is well worth it.
And then I subscribed. I started buying stuff. Don't go there unless you really want to get
attached and you have some time to devote to it. As President Trump is settling into his new
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Jordan, great to have you back. It's really good to see you.
Oh, so yeah, I love Peterson Academy. It's very smart. It's a place for someone to educate
themselves. You know, the people who are rejecting possibly going to Brown University in today's day and age can instead go to Peterson Academy and learn lessons
that actually really will help them improve their lives. What's the goal of it? Let me just start
there. And who's it for? Well, the goal was to bring university education into the 21st century
on more specifically to find the best professors
in the world and to bring them to everyone at the lowest possible price. And I'm in a fortunate
position because I have interviewed and met thousands of people, and I have a very large
connection among academics and thinkers in general, and a reasonable reputation among them. And so if I talk to them
about Peterson Academy and invite them to lecture about whatever they would love to lecture about,
they're very likely to do that. And we have an extremely efficient team. So we like to joke that
we're 10 times the quality at 120th the price price and i actually think that's about right because at the typical large university regardless of its uh reputation the bulk of the lectures are not top
great top rate i'd say maybe 10 of them are and all of ours are top one%. And so you can learn a tremendous amount. We have a very good social network there
too. It's free of bots and trolls and the sorts of people who make normal social media interaction
quite the insanity provoking ordeal. And our social media site, The Quad, is very positive
and upward aiming and people seem to enjoy it a lot.
Well, it's a great idea. I love that you're doing it and really as is typical for your voice in the national conversation, helping people, really helping people. I've got to kick it off here
because what happened was yesterday I went on the Adam Carolla show and he wanted to discuss, I don't think we ever actually got to it,
but he wanted to discuss this article. He drew my attention to from NBC news dated March 24th.
And the head line of the piece is the plight of boys and men once sidelined by Democrats
is now a priority. And the sub headline is, in recent months,
three Democratic governors have announced initiatives geared toward helping boys and men.
And when I saw initiatives, my note on the page was, duh, no, right? Like, to me,
I'll tell you what they're doing, but you're the expert. And you tell me because you've been
speaking out about the plight of boys and men a lot longer than NBC News has been paying attention to it.
You tell me whether they're getting it.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
So it just happens to be at least two of the three are presidential hopefuls on the Dem side.
The third is Ned Lamont of Connecticut, my adopted home state, who is very clueless.
But the other two are Wes Moore
of Maryland, who's said to be on the short list, very charismatic, black governor who is more
centrist or so they'd have us believe in his approach to governing. And then there's Michigan
governor Gretchen Whitmer. So here's what they're doing. Okay. Moore says the well-being of our young men and
boys has not been a societal priority. True. Then he says, hold on, let me find it,
that he's going to create programs to help in particular boys from the inner city and encourage them to pursue jobs in education and healthcare,
to help boys with the juvenile justice system, and to make sure he solicits input from boys and men
on how those initiatives are designed. To me, this seems like he's focused on inner city boys
and helping them overcome poverty and so on. Okay. Then there's Gretchen Whitmer who shared plans
on how she's going to boost young men's enrollment in higher education and skills training.
And then there's Ned Lamont of Connecticut who announced what he called a DEI initiative,
which he thinks, quote, folks on both sides of the aisle may appreciate to get more men into teaching. You're going to tell me what my
reaction to this was. You've shot and you've missed. They need to spend more time at Peterson
Academy. But you tell me whether this is the answer. Well, it's a little late in the game to
be concerned about the sorts of things
that I would say the progressives have actually produced. I mean, we've had four generations,
say 60 years at least, of targeted demoralization of young men and, well, men in general, boys,
young men, and men in general, because because boys play preferences are verboten in schools, which is why so many of them So they're more of a, you could say they're more of a discipline problem.
It depends on what you're trying to discipline them to do.
And so they're discriminated against as boys in the education system.
And then as young men, they're taught that all of their ambition, their competitiveness, let's say, is nothing but a manifestation of the forces that have oppressed women for millennia and also what propagating the human race in general
as a responsible man is the worst thing you can do for the future. I don't really see that a few
scattered half-wit DEI programs aimed at rectifying the consequences of this idiot
propagandizing are going to have the least
bit of difference. They're certainly not going to get more men in the teaching system. That
ship has sailed long ago. There is no faculty more corrupt than the faculties of education.
And conservatives have been asleep, unconscionably asleep for 60 years,
while the faculties of education promoted the worst of all possible idiot academic doctrines,
whole word learning, social emotional learning, self-esteem training, you name it. There's a stupid idea. Oh, multiple intelligences,
practical intelligence, all these complete travesties of psychological theory, all adopted
by the faculties of education. The worst students generally become teachers. They have the worst
professors. They are awarded for their pathological efforts 50% of the state budgets.
Right?
I don't know if you know that figure, but K-12 education eats up 50% of the state's budgets. teachers who come through the faculties of education because they have a hammerlock on certification, which the Republicans and the conservatives are still not paying any attention
to. And so you're not going to fix that problem. Well, first of all, the Democrats aren't interested
in fixing it at all because to call them in bed with the teachers unions and the faculties of
education is to say almost nothing about
how deeply in bed they are. No, it's now the Democrats know perfectly well that they've lost
the male vote and certainly the young male vote. Young men are more conservative than
any generation has been in, well, in the, in the, in, in the memorable past, in living memory,
let's say. And that's going to happen with young
women eventually too because young women lag young men right because young women like men
they're about five years older four years older on average so comparing young men and young women
at any given time with regards to their political uh beliefs isn't reasonable from a psychological perspective.
So the, yeah, keep going.
Wow.
It's terrible.
What's being done to young men is terrible.
And we're seeing the results of that, but that's partly why they're turning so radically
all across the world, by the way.
Young men are becoming more conservative and more religious, interestingly enough.
So the Democrats are paying attention to this now because Trump won, because they ignored this group, more than ignored them.
They disparaged them.
They demeaned them.
They ignored them.
They were just completely undermining of any male empowerment whatsoever. To the contrary,
they seemed determined to disempower them in every way, to make my sons and everyone else's
pay some toll for the perceived sins, perceived by the left, of their great-great-grandfathers.
And now they're panicked because they like winning
elections. Go ahead. Well, post-George Floyd, the big corporations decided that they were going to
go all in on the DEI front, and they just stopped hiring or promoting young men, Caucasian men in
particular. And so why your sons, for example, or my son, for that matter,
should be paying the price for whatever hypothetical sins his ancestors hypothetically
committed is, well, that's all part of the leftist notion that people should be categorized by group
and that the way you attain equity in the equity, you know, equality of outcome in the current milieu is by being prejudiced against people by inconsequence of their race and gender.
Yeah, well, thankfully, a lot of that's coming to an end, although let's make no mistake about it.
It's not come to an end in the universities.
I mean, you know that.
Or K through 12.
Well, yeah, well, that that's just done. Like, and again, like, I put a fair bit of responsibility for this at the feet of the Republicans. It's like, have you guys been you guys? I don't mean you specifically, Megan, obviously, but they've been asleep at the wheel for four generations. And even now, the Trump administration is taking aim at the Department of Education
federally. But, you know, that's a tiny proportion of the actual trouble, the real troubles at the
state level. And I can't see how the school system could be set up any worse. It's unbelievably
expensive. It does a terrible job at making kids literate and numerate. It's
radically propagandistic in the most insane possible ways. I mean, the idea that
we should be teaching our children to be confused about their sexual and gender identities,
period, but let alone in elementary and junior high schools. You couldn't do anything. You
literally can't do anything to confuse children more deeply than to confuse them about whether
or not they're male or female. Yes. And just, I mean, the audience has heard this, but
just as a reminder, we pulled our children, our two boys and our daughter. She was at a different school. We pulled our children from their New York City private schools in the country and an all boys school where they're supposed to
have some knowledge and expertise in educating boys in the third grade without telling the
parents they unleashed a several week long educational program on these boys on trans
issues featuring men running around in tutus suggesting if you like the color purple,
you might potentially secretly be a girl, and then made the little boys, all these boys in
third grade, raise their hands and say on a scale of one through five how certain they were that
they were boys. I can't remember whether it was the five or the fist that's, that just suggested,
I'm just confused about what you're saying here. Like, I don't understand what you're asking me.
And all these little kids chose that option because they didn't even have any understanding
of what was being introduced to them. And it was, this was a school Jordan, where all the parents
who go there most are really wanting little junior to get into
Harvard or Yale or Stanford. And so these parents typically do not push back because the name of
the game is to be well-liked by the administration and the people who have juniors future in their
hands. And even this group after that was outraged and revolted and stood up to say,
what are you doing? They were actually
teaching the children that there could be a hundred genders, but at least three or four.
I mean, I heard that with my own ears from a teacher. So I think what you're saying for
people out there who are thinking, no, they can't. No, it's absolutely true. We lived it.
And you're right. To me, it was child abuse.
We pulled them because they were being abused by these teachers.
Well, you see, your story just highlights how deep the problem is because you're in private school and it's a high-end private school and still the same thing is happening.
And so that's indicative of how deep the rot is.
And the problem that the parents that you described still have is they think it's 1995.
And that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools are what they were.
I taught at Harvard, let's say, in 1995.
I was there from 92 to 98. And the bottom third, who
probably were geniuses at some other subject, they'd catch on with a little work. The senior
faculty were great. The junior faculty were top rate and hardworking. It was really a good place.
And it had a well-deserved reputation, which it had built up over decades by strenuously selecting only, virtually only,
on the basis of merit. There was also some selection in terms of family history, but
that didn't, overall, that didn't produce a decrement in student quality. And since 2010, there were some signs of rot in the 1990s because some of the departments like English had already become pretty politically correct.
And I had my run-ins with the Department of English when I was at Harvard. Minor things, but helling.
But by about 2010, that whole reality just, it just doesn't exist anymore.
That's partly why we built Peterson Academy, because my sense, I've also been involved with
Ralston College in Georgia. We're attempting there to build another bricks and mortar
institution. And that's been quite successful. We've graduated three top-rate master's classes at Ralston College. But it's a very expensive enterprise, whereas online, the price is, well,'s partly because the accreditation agencies are also captured by the woke mob.
And so part of what your parents have to do is they have to understand that it's not 1995 and that you're not doing your children a service by sending them to, especially the boys.
Well, I wouldn't even say that. It might even be worse for the girls now.
And we could get into that if you'd like, because
I didn't purposely focus my attention on boys. It's just that when I started my YouTube channel,
80% of YouTube viewers and listeners are male. And so I picked up a big male audience, but
it's not like the girls are in better shape. I would say arguably on the psychological side, they're in worse shape.
It's more than 50% of young women, 18 to 34, who profess liberal political proclivity also
self-report at least one diagnosed mental illness and rates of depression and anxiety
in that population, 18 to 34-year-old young women have skyrocketed.
And we should also point out
that the entire progressive enterprise would collapse if young women weren't being propagandized
in a massive manner, not only by the universities, but by bad actors at the international level
on platforms like TikTok, which like what's happening to young women on TikTok is
absolutely reprehensible. I've documented that with some of the people I'm working with. And
yeah, it's terrible. Well, obviously, you can't demoralize young men without simultaneously
terribly affecting young women, because what's harmful to one sex is going to be immediately harmful to the
other and so all this hand-waving on the part of the democrats is it's too little too late and
it's also i'm certain that they don't have the wherewithal to do this properly because virtually
everything they've set their foundations on is rotten to the core. As you can tell,
everyone knows. That's why, what are the Democrats running at now in terms of popularity in the U.S.?
Something like 27%. With their own party. Their own party is at that level, never mind with
net voters. I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who are on the
left. And my one friend, or at least formerly of the left, my one friend has a son who is now 16
and who was like she was, very left, a committed Democrat. And he's been raised in New York City, surrounded by
other Democrats and gone through the school systems there, which are replete with Democrats.
And he and many of his friends now are Trump-supporting, MAGA-hat-wearing Republicans.
And so I asked her after I saw this article in NBC, and I knew you were going to come
on today. I said, what, try to explain, you know, in a nutshell, what did it, what, how did he have
this dramatic transformation? Because I've known them, you know, I've, I saw him go from this
leftist to this MAGA hat wearing kid. And she summed it up by saying, actually, I pulled it, but she summed it up as follows. She said, the main communication between government and young people is education. If the curriculum is that white voices don't matter anymore, that's alienating to every white boy out there. She said, my son feels that they have blamed straight white men
for everything. He is not allowed to read white male authors at school there. And it reminded me,
Jordan, of a story. My one friend told me about his sister, who was a visiting professor at Smith
College, where she came in. They asked her to come be a visiting professor. She was from Yale
and she taught English. And she got reported almost immediately to the dean of her group.
Why? Not because her syllabus for the students had a bunch of white males on there,
but because she had any, because there was a white male on the syllabus.
Westmore and Ned Lamont and Gretchen Whitmer will never acknowledge any of this,
nor, God forbid, say that it's a potential problem.
Yeah, well, that's more indication of just how deep the rot goes. I seriously can't see, and I don't say this with any satisfaction.
You know, I really like McGill University in Montreal.
I had a great graduate education there.
I had a great advisor.
And I love teaching at Harvard.
And I really enjoyed the University of Toronto for
the 20 years I was there before everything fell apart in about 2017. And I'm not the least bit
happy to be pointing my finger at these institutions and say that they've not only
lost their way, but that they're perverting all of our young people and all of our institutions,
and that they're clearly not salvageable.
And I know why they're not salvageable.
So the first reason is that they became absurdly administratively top heavy. And that happened pretty much from the 60s onward,
where all the extra money that was devoted to education essentially went not to students,
and certainly not to professors or researchers, but to an ever expanding administration.
And that probably peaked around, in terms of just administration, that probably peaked around 2010. And then the woke mob took over the administration. And so now that's who runs the universities. EI and equity terminology, but all they'll do is camouflage their same machinations under
different headings. They already think this way. Those are fundamental differences. They're not
surface. They're not going to retool their epistemological commitments. They're not going
to become different philosophically. They're not going to learn their lesson and then on the faculty side especially in the last 10 years say when
you literally couldn't get hired at a university well first of all if you were male and caucasian
you just take that off the table but also if you didn't write a diversity statement that indicated your submission to
or fervent advocacy of the radical progressive ideology.
And I swear allegiance to it.
Absolutely.
In the University of California system, which was a great system for a long time, especially on the scientific side,
80% of candidates were knocked out of the running for beginning positions as assistant professors in the scientific realms because their diversity statements were inadequate. This was before
their research dossiers were evaluated.
Now, you just can't imagine, unless you're a scientist, can't imagine what that means.
The only thing that matters with regards to the prediction of your ability as a researcher,
and this is statistically speaking, the best predictor of your future success as a researcher is the number of publications you had as a graduate student, because that's actually a direct index of how well you did your job. And so to take that off the table in favor of racial categories and political belief means that the scientific endeavor is just, it's dead in the water at the universities.
It's meaningless. This also happened just FYI, speaking of our New York City experience,
one of the top schools in New York, Brearley, that's an all-girls school, which is just a
funnel to the Ivies. And it's one of those schools where many, many parents in New York would give
anything to get their child in there.
I mean, the tuition now is probably nearing 70 grand a year.
Same thing.
You had to, as a family, applying your daughter to the school, affirm your commitment to DEI and offer one of these DEI values and how they're incorporated into your family statements on applying to the school.
So they were screening out anybody. They didn't want anybody. And I think it's still in place
at Brearley who didn't bend the knee fully and completely to DEI and then have specific
examples of how it was being incorporated into their child rearing at home. Keep going.
Yeah, well, so the reason the Ivy League diploma became so valuable is that from about 1960 onward,
the universities made a concerted effort to select essentially on the basis of intellectual capacity, general cognitive ability.
And that's a measure that differs widely between people.
As everyone who's ever gone to school knows, you know perfectly well that in the average class of 30 kids,
there's three kids that are outstanding academic performers. And there's three kids who just can't be taught
even the basics without a tremendous amount of extra effort. Everyone knows that. And what the
universities as a whole did, especially after World War II, but it really got going in the 60s,
was radically select on the basis of intelligence and what that meant was that
an ivy league degree was a stamp of extreme intellectual competence and that's why the brand
value went through the roof now the effective intelligence on performance isn't linear. It's exponential, right?
And so if you can select selectively
for extremely intelligent people,
you get a nonlinear return
in terms of enhanced productivity
in consequence of doing that.
And so the universities did that,
especially with the SATs and the GREs
and the LSATs and the MCATs, which, although there's a lot of noise around this, are fundamentally
intelligence tests. And so now if you can stamp your graduates with the assurance that they're
in the 99th percentile for intelligence, then it makes perfect sense for every employer worth his salt
to line up to hire them.
Okay, but now what happened was the universities produced a brand
that was of unbelievable economic value
because of their selection technologies.
And then that got gamed by the progressives and the radicals.
So they can destroy the universities by filling them with progressives, let's say, who are selected for reasons other than their value. Now that's already starting to happen.
A lot of the tech companies are moving toward their own selection
because the universities are no longer viable as screening institutions.
But these parents you talk about, like I said,
especially in places like New York that are still democratic to the core,
they still think it's 1995.
And it's not even 2000 anymore.
Like it's seriously not 1995.
Things have changed a lot and they're going to change more.
We hope with Peterson Academy that we can keep our students on the cutting edge of learning and that we'll leverage all the new learning technologies to make that possible
and be able to do that, as I said, radically, radically less expensively. We already have
50,000 students who've taken us up on the offer. And so I can't, I really can't see, Megan, I'm
really dead serious about this. You know, like I said, I was involved, am involved with Ralston
College. I've had conversations with the University of Austin folks.
If the universities were salvageable, that would be a lovely thing.
But here's the thought.
The universities are rotting everywhere.
Everywhere.
Okay, so one diagnosis is the reason they're rotting is because they're dead.
Their time is over.
That's not reversible. Well,
I've watched companies fail, like big companies, tech companies, research institutions, all sorts
of different large organizations. And it's very hard to stem the tide once it turns, very hard.
And if your organization is only making one mistake, that might be fatal. But I think the
universities are making, like I made a list once, I think they're making 10 mistakes.
Well, can you believe, like I'm thinking about Ned Lamont in Connecticut. So he thinks if he
greases the wheels for more boys to become teachers,
that this is going to be the solution.
Now, it would be great to have more male role models
for boys in K through 12 education.
I think everybody can see the value of that.
But what does he ignore?
He ignores the fact that we live in Connecticut
where there are a significant number of large cities
where there is a large black population.
And in over 70 percent of black homes, they are missing a father. There is no father figure.
The father has split and there's no one who stepped in to fill the gap. Why don't you start
there, Ned Lamont? He would never speak of that, Jordan. Right. He's not going to talk about the
crisis in boys missing strong male role models
and start in the black community, which actually would help those young boys on their own get into
elite academic institutions much more than saying, I'm going to grease the pipeline for them to become
teachers. Yeah, well, you know, there are schools that have managed to teach non-selected inner city kids extraordinarily effectively. There's a school in the UK called the Michaela School run by Catherine Birbelsingh, which has done a job that's so good, work and can work for minorities.
Catherine Birbelsingh School is minority dominated.
The students are selected from low tiers in the economic hierarchy.
And she graduates more students into Russell Group universities.
That includes Oxford and Cambridge.
Well, let's stick with Oxford and Cambridge to begin with.
She graduates a higher percentage of her students into Russell group
universities than any other school in the UK, including Eaton.
And so the kinds of initiatives that are being proposed can work.
But one of the comical things about Catherine Burbles saying is that the UK
press and the teachers hate her because she's conservative to the bone.
She used to be a lefty and her school is extremely disciplined and top-down organized. touch with a 10-foot pole, no matter how good the demonstrated effects, even for minorities,
but that her approach is absolute anathema to them. Now, and then with regard to your broader
comment, so it's increasingly normative in the Black community for children to be raised in a father absent home. And that's been spiraling toward the majority since the early
1960s. But we should also note that the Black population is only ahead of the game in that
curve. Like the Hispanic population curves for fatherlessness are the same as the blacks, except 10 years later. And
the same is true on the Caucasian front. Now, that's not true for the wealthy, by the way.
The wealthy, they still get married, right? And the Democrats won't address this fundamental issue,
obviously, because they would have to drop everything they stand for in order to even admit that fathers are necessary.
And that's also appalling beyond comprehension because there's almost no facts that are more thoroughly documented
in the developmental psychology literature than the detrimental effects on children, boys and girls alike, of fatherlessness.
So girls without a father
hit puberty one year earlier. And that's just an indication of the magnitude,
even of the physiological consequences of not having a man around. Girls mature sexually
faster so they can attract a man, even though there's still, you know, there's still no there's still children in their psychological development
and boys without a father at the age of 12 already have telomeres that are much shorter than their
peers with fathers and telomeres are part of the genetic structure that determines how long you'll
you'll live so they're so stressed that they're already
fated for an early death. And so, and, you know, so then now you want to address the fatherlessness
issue. Okay, well, now you have to admit that marriage is not only not an oppressive patriarchal
institution, which is one of the most idiotic claims you could ever possibly make, but that it's a net good for men, women, and children alike,
and that any attempts to decenter it are cataclysmic.
It's like, the Democrats aren't going to go there, that's for sure.
That's the thing.
Their entire worldview would have to be made over.
And what we're seeing instead as they flail is these pathetic attempts
to slap band-aids on this. And by the way, Westmore in Maryland, a black man, is also not
addressing the fatherlessness piece of this. He won't speak honestly about this problem at all.
But the problem for men goes well beyond the racial issue and black families and Hispanic
families. It goes well beyond. And that's, that's where we're, you know, where we are in this conversation we're having today. But it is interesting to me to watch
them throw darts at the board to try to figure out what, what is it? Because we pulled this sound
bite over to show what the problem is. They don't, they don't care about the boys. They care about
winning elections. That's what they care about. And there was a very interesting discussion by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and his guest on the gender divide and why Trump won the last election. Listen here.
This chart in some ways convinced me to do this podcast.
Oh, thank you.
This chart shocks me. This is, to me, the scariest chart in this entire presentation. And again, you know, something I'm very surprised by.
And so what you can see is that, you know, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10%, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.
And voters over 75, it's even lower.
But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. If you look at 18-year-olds,
18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support, you know, Donald Trump than
18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics. Is that
abortion? I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is. What's interesting is that
this is happening in other countries as well. There is a sense that Democratic Party is becoming much more pro-women party and in some ways sort of anti-young men.
And that that just had a huge effect on young men's political opinions.
Of course.
His guest there, David Shore, that's where his mind goes on being shown these
numbers of the gender gap and why young men overwhelmingly are moving to the Republican
Party. It's abortion. That's that is their number one issue on the left. It must define everything
as opposed to taking a hard look at what they their side has been doing to young men for, yes, decades, but the peak over the past 10 years
has just driven these young men to extreme measures. I mean, some are suicidal. The deaths
of despair have gone up to tens of thousands per year. Scott Galloway, who's writing a book on this,
he said, we've lost more men, young men to deaths of
despair, some 400,000, uh, over the past few years. Um, then we lost in, in one of the world
wars, like we're, that's, it's all about abortion in the mind of the left. That's how we have to
fix it somehow, Jordan. Well, it's also, that's also a profoundly stupid theory, even from a
conceptual perspective, because there's no reason a priori
to assume that access to abortion i mean if it if it appeals to young women who want to keep the
sexual revolution going with no cost uh hypothetically why wouldn't it appeal to young
men for exactly the same reason it's just a stupid idea but it it shows you how bereft the Democrat theorists are on the ideational side to jump to
that conclusion immediately. And, you know, what they don't understand, really, there's a long list
things they don't understand. But in the black community, let's say with regard to black young young men, is that by not concentrating on marriage. So at this group I put together
in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, we tried to put together a visionary
form of conservatism and classic liberalism, let's say, because conservatives aren't very
good on the vision front generally, because their attitude is we should just keep doing
what we're doing that works. And that's not exactly a vision. Things are so unstable now that even the
conservatives have to put forward a vision. And one of the biggest fights we had within our
organization was a fight in relationship to how are we going to conceptualize support for
the future families. And we settled on long-term, stable, committed, heterosexual,
child-centered marriages, knowing that there has to be a domain of tolerance around that center
ideal, because people get divorced, and there are single mothers, and there are gay people,
and there are widows, and there are orphans and, you know, and there are widows and
there are orphans. I mean, just because there's an ideal doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention
to the margin, let's say, but the ideal has to stay intact. Now, you might say, well, why is that
a saleable message to young people? You see, I know why, because I've been selling that message to young people for 15 years and very successfully. So I know what I'm talking about.
What you want to tell young men is that they have something crucially important to do that's
exciting and difficult and meaningful. And they find that in the voluntary adoption of responsibility. They don't find that in idiot hedonism or in the struggle for power.
They find it in their willingness to make themselves into somebody who might be attractive to a young woman, let's say, who has her head screwed on straight enough to understand that there isn't a greater privilege that she'll have
in her life if she's fortunate than to become a mother. You know now maybe half of women in the
West at 30 have no child. Half of those women will never have a child. They won't find a mate.
They won't have a child. And 90% of them will be very upset about that.
And so by deprioritizing marriage, we're doing young people such a terrible disservice.
It's like, let's think about young black men.
It's like, okay, they're not going to get married.
So then, first of all, why the hell should they grow up?
Like young men grow up.
We know this.
We've known this as psychologists for decades.
Young men quit their adolescent hijinks somewhere in their mid-20s if they gain stable employment and find a mate. And the reason they do that is because they think, well, why the hell not
just drink and carouse around if no one's depending on me? You know, and that's a
reasonable question. I'm not saying that's a particularly mature attitude, but it takes some,
you need something resting on your shoulders to motivate you to take the leap into sacrificial responsibility.
But the thing about sacrificial responsibility, that's what I've outlined in this new book of mine, by the way, is that it lends meaning to your life.
Real meaning, the kind of meaning that sustains you through suffering.
It's like, well, why not be Peter Pan and hang out forever with Tinkerbell the Porn Fairy
and be king of the lost boys?
And the answer to that is because you miss your life
and you have nothing to go for you,
nothing to rely on when times of trouble come to visit you.
Grow the hell up.
Now, well, what does the left tell young men?
Well, if you grew up and adopted responsibility, you'd just be oppressing your wife because marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution.
Even though married women with children are by far the happiest women.
The happiest.
Surprise, surprise.
That's right. That was just reaffirmed in a poll that came out last week. By far, their happiness dwarfs the other groups. Yeah. Well, and married religious people have the most sex. So there's a comical statistic for you. That's the culmination of 60 years of sexual
revolution. The hedonists don't have anybody. They're in the basement having their way with the pornographic screen and the married religious couples are happy and sexually fulfilled. Well, that isn't what anybody predicted in 1963. Megan, everything's upside down and young men have figured it out. And I know that because I see
thousands of them everywhere, all over the world, all the time. And I'll tell you that people who
come to my shows now, they look a hell of a lot better than they did five years ago.
They're standing. Is that right? They've got a partner. They've got a child.
They tell me what they've done.
They're thrilled about it.
Enough of this.
Bloody Democrats.
This idiot progressivism. You just have no idea how many people that's ruined.
And we haven't even started to talk about what is done to young women.
Christ, they're so deluded.
You know, whenever someone makes a clip of me talking about the fact that
young women need to make finding a husband and having a child a priority
in their 20s, probably their early 20s,
and then they can concentrate on their career if
they're inclined to for the next 30 years of their life, just plenty to be a slave to a corporate
entity. You know, I don't make clips like that and put them online. But people clip my lectures and,
you know, maybe they'll make a little three minute piece where I'll say something like that.
And it's inevitably the case that the comments fill up with comments from young women that are so vitriolic that they just make your hair curl.
About, you know, this horrible old white man who's telling them what to do with their bodies, which is so idiotic because I'm trying to warn them. I had lots of women in my clinical practice who
ended up alone and childless in their thirties and then got desperate about it, you know,
because you get desperate about it. And let me tell you, that's not fun.
Well, and the other thing is these women can take the advice or leave the advice, but it speaks to
a lot of people. And why is it their prerogative? Why do
they need to tell you that you're a woman hater? Because this is how you see the world. This is
what your expertise has driven you to conclude. This is what interviewing and counseling all
these patients has led you. I mean, it's a valid viewpoint that they can take for what it's worth
or reject, but not, then comes the names, you know, calling and the mudslinging. And we're going to get into that in a minute because
I'm very interested in, first of all, I'm going to show the audience what some of these Democrats
are now trying to do. And I believe it's a direct effort to recruit young men. In addition to this
effort we've discussed, there's another one underway. And then we're going to talk more
about the blowback that Jordan has received just for saying these things.
This is his POV, and it's very well informed.
But it has not come without a personal and professional price for Jordan Peterson, who stays with me for the full show.
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debt dot com. We talked about this Democratic governor plan, at least in three instances of
somehow recruiting young young men back to the Democrat Party. The those in power over in the U.S. Senate,
for example, seem to have a different approach in mind. And all I can guess is that this is their
idea of the masculinity that they have erased from their own party. They think this is how to
restore it. You tell me whether you agree They think this is how to restore it.
You tell me whether you agree and whether this is effective.
Take a look.
Hey there.
Chris Murphy.
It's been a very long, long day today
full of a lot of bullshit,
a lot of threats to democracy.
Tonight I want to talk about Signalgate
and what a colossal fuck-up this is in terms of our to democracy. Tonight, I want to talk about Signalgate and what a colossal fuck up this is
in terms of our national security.
Which should divert people
from the number one issue
we have against these bastards.
Sorry, these people.
So two U.S., well, three U.S. senators
and one of whom is the minority leader.
More and more, you know, off-color words. I'm a big fan of swearing,
as my audience knows. It only works if it comes organically to you. This did not seem organic
at all. Chuck Schumer seemed uncomfortable actually saying it there. But my own belief,
Jordan, is that this is their belief of how to win young men back. Well, that's a topic well worth delving into,
partly because it would also enable us to talk a little bit about what's happening
hypothetically on what is hypothetically described as the right. So I guess you might,
there's a number of people who have influenced young men in a more conservative
direction. And I'm one of them. And Ben Shabero is another. And Andrew Tate is a third.
And I warned people back in 2016, that if they kept making men weak, that there would be a consequence of that because weak men do very terrible things.
They turn, for example, for their models to people like Andrew Tate. Now, the reason I'm
bringing that up in relationship to the clips that you showed me is because you put together
three clips that are predicated on the assumption that masculinity has this kind of
brisk, pushy, I don't give a damn if I swear on national TV because I'm so tough kind of
men to it. And it's very easy for weak men to assume that power is the defining characteristic of a respectable man, like an actually masculine man. And that's what
Andrew Tate, at least in part, purports to sell his audience. So now Andrew Tate is a very bad actor,
to say the least. He's a pimp, an electronic pimp. And I think pimps are possibly the lowest form of male life because they are parasitic
on women.
And that's about as bad as you can get.
If you're a man, uh, maybe you can get lower cause you could be parasitic on children,
but being parasitic on women, that's pretty bad.
And he's taught his followers how to be this, you know,
playboy Lothario type of love them and leave them, do it my way or hit the goddamn highway
sort of attitude. And you know, if you've been demoralized your entire life, and you haven't
been attractive to women, and you're not doing well in your career, and you're very disoriented,
and you've had no role models at all, then someone who has all the trappings of
surface success, like Andrew Tate, and who's very good at flaunting it, can look like just
the medicine you need. And to give the devil his due, you know, I can understand why men who
have nothing would at least want to have something. And I can see that Andrew Tate offers that to
them. And that is not any advocacy for Andrew Tate, as I've already made my view of him very clear. Now, the left likes to think that Andrew Tate and me, for example,
are gateways to the alt-right and that somehow we're the same.
And we're not the same at all.
And what I'm offering young men is a pathway to adulthood
through responsibility, not through the exercise of power.
Now, if you're powerful and you're strong
and you're forthright and you're articulate, then you can harness all that power into your
responsibility, and that can make you an even better man. But if you weaken men, they will 100%.
They'll become nihilistic, they'll become hedonistic, and they'll worship power.
And Andrew Tate is exactly the face of power worship. And you can bloody well expect to see
a lot more of that coming down the pipes. And if the Democrats are daft enough to turn to a power
representation of masculinity, because they're too foolish to understand the relationship, let's say,
between responsibility and proper masculinity, then they deserve exactly what's coming to them.
And what will come to them is no increase whatsoever in their approval rating among
young men because anyone with a clue can see through what they're doing in 15 seconds flat.
But they'll also do nothing but promote people like Andrew Tate and then will have serious
trouble.
That's for sure.
You know, it's interesting because I listened to a bunch of leftists talk about this issue in
recent weeks because I'm curious to see what they think the problem is. And many, many, if not all, blame President Trump. They think he's, you know, a bully. He swears occasionally.
He's not nice to people, they think. They think he's bad to women. And then Elon gets dumped in
there for good measure, too, as same on all those fronts. And once again, Jordan, I think they've
totally misunderstood what it is about Trump, and for that matter, Elon, that is drawing young men to them. I don't think it has anything to do with Trump and his behavior toward women 30 years ago. And I don't think it's Trump's occasional dropping of a swear, although I do think that makes him seem much more relatable to, especially the working class. You know, that's how folks talk. That's how I talk too, frankly. But I think it makes them more relatable as opposed to a Mitt
Romney who is just perfectly buttoned up and smoothed out. And you know, there's less to
sort of grab onto, less grit. Elon is incredibly successful, which I think everyone can respect,
but he's not out there. I don't know. Maybe he's a little pugilistic these days because he's in it
and he's getting punched so often. these days because he's in it and
he's getting punched so often. But can you speak to that? Why do you think the left thinks
that what's happening on the right with respect to some admiration for Andrew Tate, et cetera,
is really the fault of Donald Trump? That's how they interpret it, that these
toxically masculine guys are the product of Trumpism.
Well, it's partly because the left doesn't have a vision of responsible masculinity.
So it's either, you know, soy boy or bully.
That's their whole theory of masculinity.
And if you're, you shouldn't be a bully because that's the worst.
And actually that's not the worst.
If you think bully is the worst, you know very little about worst. There's abysses of
hell that make bully look like paradise. And the Democrats, the progressives, are very naive in
their conceptualization of malevolence and evil. They tend to think that bad people are victims.
It's like, that's because in their world, bad people don't exist. And in my
world, bad people exist. And I know what they're like. And bully is a pretty desirable form of bad
person compared to the real monsters. And the Democrats just have no clue of that at all. And
so they don't know what sort of man, boy would admire if he was set on the right path. Because, well, for example,
they think marriage is a patriarchal, oppressive institution. And so a man who's willing to
offer himself as a husband and a father, well, he's just another bloody oppressor, isn't he?
I mean, from that standpoint, they should love Elon, given his failure to marry and have a bunch of kids.
Well, it is one of the paradoxical things about Elon, too.
Like, he's a very weird conservative.
So he's not a conservative, and neither is Trump, obviously.
Neither is Trump.
No.
And also, by the way, the divide in our society is no longer between left and right.
Those categories don't even make any sense sense anymore as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, one of the Democrats
whose video you posted earlier
pointed out that, you know,
increasingly the Democrats
are the side of,
are the party of women.
And that's part of what's happening
is actually, we're actually seeing
a sex divide in terms
of political affiliation.
But it's not because the women
are becoming left
and the men becoming right it's
because the left is now feminine and the right is now masculine and the political distinctions
have become virtually undetectable and irrelevant the old categories don't work now and it isn't
it isn't it isn't only that the left has become feminine and the right
has become masculine but that's a big part of what's driving the strangeness of of today's
political discourse because it's also the case that the democrats have become pathologically
feminine and that's not the same thing as becoming feminine no the democrats will say well the the
the republicans have become pathologically masculine And there is a danger of that. Like Andrew Tate's
the face of pathological masculinity. And you can see that to some degree in Trump,
because he likes to throw his weight around and he's actually very good at it. But fundamentally,
like, first of all, you can look at his family. I mean, they're a pretty high
functioning bunch. There's no Hunter Biden in the Trump tribe, you know, and he seems to get along
pretty well with his wife and she seems to be a pretty classy character and she stays in her lane.
And I don't mean that in any misogynist way. I mean, she's got their deal.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and she's got enough humility to play her role well and to be apparently satisfied and grateful for that by all appearances.
And so, you know, Trump is a blustery character,
and he's definitely got that kind of throw-your-shoulders-around masculinity
that is attractive to people who confuse power with masculinity.
But he's also, there's a lot more to Trump than that.
I mean, he's got a vicious, vicious sense of humor.
He's got a tremendous amount of energy.
And he's been successful at like five impossible things, just like Musk.
And you can throw that away as you would if you felt that all forms of capitalist success
are just another manifestation
of oppressive patriarchy. But, you know, that's a pretty idiot theory unless you're a progressive
leftist. Yeah, I think you're exactly right on that. So you've been saying all these things for
years now, many years. And, you know, it may be if Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer and Adam Schiff and Chris Murphy and Chuck Schumer had listened to you back in 1516, maybe their party wouldn't be in this predicament.
I don't know, because you're saying it's really a worldwide phenomenon.
It's caused by leftism, though.
I think that's at its core what it's been caused by. And I don't see leftism, more leftism being the cure for it, but it may be some awakeness
on the part of the left, not wokeness, but some awakeness on what they've done to young men is a
positive. In any event, I don't know that they're capable of getting there because one of the
controversies that you suffered through as a result of speaking these truths was a Hollywood actress and director, Olivia Wilde,
made a whole movie about this alleged toxic masculinity,
and it starred a fake you.
Chris Pine played a character who she admitted
was based on Olivia Wilde's view of Jordan Peterson.
And she was extremely nasty talking about you.
She went on, uh,
in her PR tour, promoting her movie. Um, don't worry, darling was the name of it saying, uh,
you're an insane person who is quote a pseudo intellectual hero to the incel community
incel for the listening audience. I think you know this, but it's, it's stands for, um,
involuntarily celibate young men who are not having any sexual relations whatsoever. And the despair that comes
with that is rejected. It's really just, they're painted as basically white supremacists, alt-right
people who gravitate onto meaningless, uh, pseudo intellectuals in Olivia Wilde's view.
And so there, here's just a clip from her movie of Chris Pine
playing what we now know is a Jordan Peterson type. And then we'll pick it up from there.
Dean, what is the enemy of progressasty word. Chaos.
Merciless foe at chaos.
Energy unfocused, innovation hindered, hope strangled, greatness disguised.
I see greatness in each one of you.
I know exactly who you are.
What are we doing? Changing the world. What are we doing? Changing the world. What are we
doing? Changing the world. That's right. Okay. That was absolutely atrocious acting and directing
and presentation. But the attack on you was obvious. And of course, they make you seem like some faux preacher type and like a cult leader from the 1950s
instead of what you're actually doing.
And there was an extraordinary moment
where you went on with our pal Piers Morgan after this
and he asked you about it.
And it was very moving, but I want to play the clip.
Here it is, SOT 12.
I want to ask you just quickly,
the film director Olivia Wilde has a new movie out,
which she says is based on you, this insane man, this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel
community, incel being these weirdo loner men who are despicable in many ways. Is that you?
Are you the intellectual hero to these people? Sure. Why not?
You know, people have been after me for a long time
because I've been speaking to disaffected young men.
You know, what a terrible thing to do that is.
I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
It's making you emotional to talk about that.
Well, God, you know.
It's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are.
And certainly many young men are in that category.
Why did that make you so emotional, Jordan? What,
what is it you've seen that Olivia Wilde hasn't?
Well, I'd like to say something in defense of Chris Pine momentarily. I heard through the
grapevine, by the way, that he had no idea that that character was based on me
until after he finished the movie. And he started paying some attention to what I was saying and
actually found out that he agreed with my stance. So now I'm not absolutely certain that's true,
but I heard it from a very reliable source. So if I've got that wrong, my apologies,
but I'd like to set the record clear
if I do have it right. Well, that clip's very interesting, eh? Because it indicates the
misapprehension of, first of all, what I think. Like, it was interesting that the screenplay
focused on chaos, for example, because it is the case that chaos and possibility
tend to be symbolized with the feminine.
And that's not my doing.
That's the basis of literary symbolism
and psychological symbolism for thousands and thousands of years.
And it's partly because the feminine is a useful symbolic marker
for possibility because females bring new life
forms into the world and so chaos isn't the enemy of order it's the dance partner of order in the
transformation that leads to progress across time so she just didn't get that right at all, like not even a bit. And that's indicative of the shallowness of her analysis.
You know, there is an element to me that's like a 1950s preacher, you know, and that's fair enough.
I mean, I've been teaching people religious stories for 40 years, and I gather large audiences, the lectures are emotional and they're motivational.
And so I can see why people who think they're my enemy are set back on their heels by that
because they don't know what to make of it. And that's not surprising because isn't it
really quite remarkable that young men will come and listen to lectures about the Bible, for example, like what the hell?
There's no logic to having that be a market or that they're happy to be lectured to about responsibility.
Like it really is a mystery.
And it's not surprising that artistic types on the left would try to figure out what the
hell's going on. But the sad thing is, is they just got it so cataclysmically wrong. So, you know,
it isn't me or the soy boys, boys and girls, it's me or Andrew Tate. So you can take your pick.
And I wouldn't recommend the worshippers of power.
If you want to see toxic masculinity, like you ain't seen nothing yet.
And if you think it's married men who are like working that are toxically masculine, then look, here's an example.
So, you know, Disney just nose planted remarkably with Snow White.
And so in the original Grimm's fairy tale, which is a very, very old story, right?
Because Grimm gathered these stories.
We have no idea how old they are.
There's indication that some of our folktales are 15,000 years old.
They're really old.
And you can't mess with them because they have a logic. Okay, so now you
might ask yourself, well, why does Snow White have to run away from the evil queen? Who's the evil
queen? Well, in the Grimm's fairy tale, the evil queen puts Snow White in a bodice that's so tight
she can't breathe. So that pathologizes her sexuality. And then she gives her a comb that poisons her
because that's the temptation towards narcissism.
And then she feeds her a poisoned apple,
which is exactly what the harpy ideologues are doing to young women
to destabilize their identity and to push them off the reproductive tract.
And so, track.
Both of those interpretations work, by the way.
And so that's the evil queen.
Okay, now when Snow White runs away from the evil queen,
where does she go to get her act together?
Well, she goes to live among the dwarfs.
And who are the dwarfs? They're
hardworking, orderly, responsible, ordinary men who keep a clean house. And she learns to be
appreciative of their ability to protect her from the evil queen. And so she grows up, and then she
can find a prince. Right? And like, these are the sorts of stories that I'm telling people.
And when I tell them, they understand because the stories make sense.
Like everything I said there is immediately comprehensible, right?
You think, oh, yes, obviously.
Right.
Well, it's not so obvious.
Not well.
Apparently controversial enough so that Disney would rewrite the entire story and spend a quarter of a billion dollars plus 150 billion on marketing to make a dull mess.
Right. And sink their damn company. And that's well, that's just an indication, one indication of how absolutely messed up we are.
You know, now that movie, I went and saw it.
It could have been a lot worse than it was.
You know, they reverted back to the dwarfs and not exactly accurately, but it was still basically a feminist revolutionary screed.
And even that could have been interesting, although it wasn't. And the evil queen wasn't particularly evil.
But the evil queen that's teaching women right now is particularly evil.
And she's already made one quarter of them.
She's already knocked one quarter of them off the reproductive pathway.
One in four.
One in four.
And so that's a complete catastrophe.
And so, you know, Olivia Wilde, she's, you know, you can understand it to some degree. She's trying to figure out, you know, what the hell,
why I'm attractive and am I the same sort of creature as Andrew Tate
and am I like Trump or the worst of Trump?
These are hard things to sort out.
But the way they were sorted out wasn't helpful.
And her movie wasn't successful because it was wrong.
She didn't get the story right. The real story is a lot more interesting you know because one of
the mysteries she could have delved into is like why the hell are people young men letting me tell
them stories about the old testament like how the hell did that happen and why is there a religious
revival sweeping across the west in partial consequence. Like that's a mystery. And you
can say, well, that's because Peterson is a, you know, power hungry misogynist, but I'm actually
not power hungry and I'm not a misogynist. So that's a stupid story. And anybody who listens
to me who actually listens for more than like 10 minutes figures that out immediately. So she just didn't, she wasn't guided by curiosity.
She was guided by ideological pre-commitment,
just like Disney.
And that doesn't work when you're telling stories.
They're dull.
The portrayal of, you know, the fake Jordan in that movie
was the least of what has happened to you
since the last time you were on.
Incredibly, it was not that long ago. It was in 2022 that you were suspended from X.
This is now unthinkable with Elon in charge, but I do believe there's a purpose to it all. I really
do. You were suspended from X due to a post about Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page. And now
she says she's a he, but she's a she. And you tweeted out during Pride Month, which made it
actually controversial. Remember when Pride was a sin and Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician. And they, you got in trouble.
You got, you're suspended from X during that time, which was then Twitter. And you said,
um, the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet.
And I would rather die than do that. That was one. And then you also posted about this woman who was in Sports Illustrated in her bathing
suit, who is morbidly obese. This is May of 2022. And you said, I'm going to leave X at this point
because I've received an endless flood of insults because you saw this picture and said, sorry,
not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going
to change that. Um, that one you did later delete, but there was so much. No, I don't think so.
Oh no. Okay. Maybe my information is wrong. Um, but my point is simply you, you are not allowed
to have those opinions, Jordan. You can't say that Elliot is still really Ellen and not a woman any longer.
And you can't say that a morbidly obese woman in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition
is, in your opinion, not beautiful.
And by implicit implication that you prefer the old approach to sports illustrated swimsuit models,
which in which you speak on both fronts for 99.9% of the world that's willing to be honest.
Yeah. Well, with regard to Paige, you know, like I think what's happened to her is just
an absolute bloody catastrophe. Like I, I think it's terrible, like seriously terrible. And I would regard her as a victim and accept that she paraded it.
And the problem with that is that once you parade your self-destructive proclivity as a virtue, you're no longer a victim, you're a perpetrator.
And so that was the dividing
line for me. Like she must have been stunningly unimaginably unhappy to have gone through what
she went through. And I can only imagine what, how she got there. And I think that the physicians
and the counselors who enabled her in that, I believe they should be put in prison for the rest of their life.
Yeah.
And I think it's absolutely unconscionable.
So that's really sad.
I used to watch Paige when she was a young woman on the Trailer Park Boys in Canada, which is this like off-color, hilarious Canadian sitcom.
And she was so charming and so lovely.
She was great in Juno.
Oh, yeah. Yeah yeah she's such an
attractive person and I can't imagine how much pain
she must have had to do that but you don't get to tell young women to do it you don't sorry that's just not
acceptable and then with regards to the swimsuit model like it has nothing to do with what i find
attractive oh i well it does insofar as what people find attractive has a universal element
which has been well documented by biologists, symmetry, for example.
But the thing is, everything about that photo was a lie.
It was a lie to manipulate the consumer because it was so radical.
It was a lie because it's sports illustrated.
And to be an athlete, you have to be physically fit.
And morbidly obese and physically fit are opposites.
And beautiful?
Well, you could argue that Sports Illustrated should have never gone into the swimsuit model business, but they did.
And it means that to accept that photograph as a valid statement of the truth, you have to dispense with the idea of beauty and athleticism.
And I'm not doing that because beauty has value, and so does athleticism. Now, that doesn't mean
that someone who's obese, who's eaten way too many carbohydrates because they've been diluted
by their government for 40 years is not worthy of a certain degree of sympathy. I certainly regard obesity as a disease.
I don't think it's a problem of willpower. I think that's a big mistake. I think that
the Department of Agriculture gerrymandering of the food pyramid for marketing purposes
pathologized the whole society in an absolutely appalling manner. But that doesn't mean that obese women
on Sports Illustrated get to be regarded as beautiful. No. But here's the thing about that
that's so infuriating. So this woman, her name is Yumi Nu, she's allowed to pose in a public
magazine. She's very well aware that in her hopes, millions of people will
see this photo and comment on it. But in her mind, the bargain, and in the mind of the left,
the bargain can only include positive feedback, compliments. And anybody who doesn't feel that
way about it and is honest about it is a villain. But meanwhile, you were not commenting and probably didn't even know who this Yumi knew was prior to her choice to put her body into a bikini and on the pages of Sports Illustrated.
You weren't picking on her.
You were just sitting around thinking, like, how can I criticize some random obese person?
She asked you to comment on her.
She asked you to. That's why she was in a magazine.
But under their rules, which are not the Jordan Peterson rules for life, you are not allowed
to be honest if honesty is anything other than absolute praise.
Well, that's, we talked earlier a little bit about the shift in the political world to the toxically feminine.
And the toxically feminine has a definition.
It's uncritical acceptance.
Right now, we can take that apart, and we should. complicated because when you're the mother of a newborn, the right ethos for you to adopt is
uncritical acceptance because for the first nine months of a child's life before the child can
crawl, let's say, and can get around on its own, the right attitude to have to that child is that
everything it wants, it should be given. And everything it needs is
not only good, not only fine and acceptable, but good. So it's complete uncritical acceptance.
And so women have to have that capacity. And it is a core part of what's admirable about femininity.
But that doesn't mean that it's the sine qua non of morality.
Like, you also need judgment.
And, like, it's been known forever that the highest divinity, let's say,
God, for all intents and purposes, rules with two hands, mercy and justice.
And mercy without justice is a devouring force. And justice without mercy is totalitarian catastrophe. You have to balance them. And the progressive left is all merciful.
And the problem with that is that that's the stance of the devouring mother.
Everything you do is okay, dear. It's like Nicola sturgeon in scotland the former prime minister
any man who says he's a woman is a woman okay there's a radical acceptance all right nicola
how about the serial killing sadistic rapists oh they're victims it's like, first of all, most people who are victims don't become serial killing, sadistic rapists. So the causal pathway isn't clear. And second, if you have one of those people under your bed, and you think they're a victim, you're going to find out very quickly that you live in a world designed for dead fools.
Well said. Well, there's tolerance, you know, fair enough.
And maybe we should even err on the side of tolerance. But when it comes to the monsters,
we need to draw a line. And you see, men, real men do that. So, for example, one of the things
I talk about in my book, We Who Wrestle
with God, is the symbolic image of the shepherd in the Old Testament. So, you know, Moses is a
shepherd, and Abel is a shepherd, and King David is a shepherd, and eventually Christ is associated
with the shepherds. And there's a reason for that, like a real reason. So a shepherd is an ordinary man,
an ordinary good man, kind of like the dwarfs that we talked about in Snow White. And why is a
shepherd a good man? Well, in biblical times, shepherds had to fight off wolves and lions,
and they did that relatively unarmed. You know, David david for example killed lions with a slingshot
think about that and so to be a shepherd you had to be able to keep the lions and the wolves at bay
so the predatory monsters and yet you had to care for the most vulnerable and that would be the lambs
okay so that's what you want in a man you want someone who can see the monsters and keep them at bay, you know, but who can also care for the vulnerable.
Now, you know, if you're a chest-beating, power-worshipping, monstrous man yourself,
well, you might be pretty good at keeping the other monsters at bay,
the kind of psychopathic, quasi-criminal types of men who aren't cowardly or dependent,
you know, they at least have that going for them, but they're not very good at
providing comfort and shelter to the truly dependent, right? So that's where they fall
apart. And so men have to do both. And that's what I've been trying to tell men.
And this is also the sorts of things that the Democrats and the progressives just don't understand.
Now the problem—
No, it's not going to be fixed by, let's make more of them teachers.
I've got to take a quick break because I've got to get this ad in.
And then we've got to touch on women and what all this is doing to women in particular when we come back with Jordan.
Don't go away.
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So, Jordan, how does all of this affect women who need men?
Well, I think the most striking statistic that I know of is,
well, the two striking statistics are the two we already discussed.
The radical rise in unhappiness among unmarried young women
who have liberal proclivities,
and the fact that 50% of women in the West now who are 30 don't have a child and that half of those
will never have a child despite wanting one. That's, it's so dreadful. Like you just take
those women, you know, let's just think about them for a minute. So that means that half of women
at 30 who don't have a child, half of them will search for a mate and try to have a child,
let's say through their thirties, and then that won't work. And so then they'll hit 40 and
they'll be alone for 50 years. Right. And the thing is, you know, as you get older, the people that you have gathered around you, your family, become increasingly important to you and increasingly necessary.
And what you do when you mature is that you start attending to other people more than you attend to yourself.
That's the definition of maturity. Now, you know that as a mother, and you also know that that's a relief, right? It's that you find your purpose in that.
And that's right. You know, when the lefties, they talk about marriage as a patriarchal
oppressive institution, and you know, you can be unlucky, and some women are. They find a man whose mode of relation is power
and they end up subjugated,
although they generally play their own part in that
because women aren't that easy to subjugate,
all things considered.
No, they say you teach people how to treat you.
Yes, well, women have their mechanisms
and they're very effective, let's put it that way.
But you see that the problem with the progressive liberal types is they think that
being mentally healthy is a matter of getting your individual psyche in order.
And that's not right.
Being mentally healthy is a matter of arranging the hierarchy around you that you belong to in a harmonious manner
so that there's you and your relationship with yourself, but then there's you and your
relationship with your husband, and then the relationship between both of you and your
children, and then the relationship between your families and other families in your town,
and then with regard to your state and your nation,
and then with regards to the natural world and to whatever's beyond that, say, in the landscape of
divinity. And happiness, resilience, meaning, purpose, are all a consequence of organizing that
hierarchy properly and finding your place within it. It's not an
individualistic pursuit. You know, and even the Scottish liberals, let's say, of the Enlightenment,
who established liberal individuality, did that with the presumption that they were operating
within a radically Christian framework and society.
So what they did was they took the existence of that hierarchy for granted and then said,
well, if you organize that property, then you can be a fully functioning individual.
It's like, fair enough. But when all that collapses and an increasing majority of young people are headed for a relationship-less and childless future, then none of those liberal presuppositions hold.
And so that makes everyone, well, it deprives their life of the meaning that comes in social service.
You know, and look, human beings are unbelievably social.
You know, you can take psychopathic murderers
and you can punish them by depriving them of other people.
That's how social we are.
Right. So think about that. That's how social we are. Right.
So think about that.
That's a good point.
Yeah, right.
So you can't be happy alone.
Besides, you shouldn't be striving to be happy anyways, because happy is a side effect, not an aim.
But even if it was an aim, which it isn't, there's no happiness alone.
I mean, what? There's nothing happier than a friendless teenager. I mean, who believes that? No one breathing believes that. That's the
stupidest thing you could believe. Like teenagers are desperate to belong, you know, and you can
parody that and say, well, if your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you? And, you know, there's limits to how much you should sacrifice your soul to be part of the group. But by the same token, like what other people think manner that makes its enactment produce nothing but resentful pathology and misery. you this. I've been dying to ask you this. I speak with a lot of young conservative women regularly. And one of the, and they are very aware of everything you've said. They are,
they've got their eye on the biological clock in a way the previous generation did not. They
understand the risks of waiting too long to choose a partner, all of that. They do get it.
But a lot of them still, they want a career of their own. They're driven
professionally in that way. And what they ask me, Jordan, is should I just settle? Should I just
settle? I'm 29 now. I have a career that I like. I haven't met the right guy yet, but there are guys
who are interested in me. So should I just settle now for somebody who I'm really not that into?
Well, the first thing I would ask is that who exactly who's settling in that equation? Like
it's quite the narcissistic proclamation that it's clearly you who's settling, you know, and that
might even be more true if you're 29, because you're competing with a lot of 24 year olds by
that point. And they put a lot less biological pressure on a potential mate. Like, look, when I was out touring three nights in a
row, the same question came up because I do a Q&A at the end of my lectures. And this is in the last
round of tours. And one of the questions was, well, how do I find the person that's right for me?
And I didn't answer it the first night. There
was something about the question I didn't like. And then it came up two more nights in a row and
was voted up by the audience. And the third night I thought, oh, I know why I'm, I tried stumbling
through an answer and it didn't work. And then the third night I thought, oh, I know what the
problem is here. That's the wrong question. Because the right question is, how do I make
myself into the sort of person that's so attractive to other people that potential mates are lining up
for me? That's a way different question than how do I find the person that's right for me?
Like, first of all, who are you? I like that. And what's so special about you that what the
how do you know that the right person wouldn't take one look at you and run away screaming if they had any sense?
Like, seriously, you know, you're settling, are you?
You know, if you use that language, even the first thing you might ask yourself is, why do you start with such a high opinion of yourself and such a low opinion of the people who are pursuing you?
Now, look, I understand that it's necessary
to be attracted to a potential partner,
you know, and that women have the right
and the duty to be picky.
They should find a man who's going to be not a child
and who's going to be very helpful to them in all ways,
particularly when they have children, who's going to be a good to them in all ways, particularly when they have
children, who's going to be a good father. And so hooray to women for being picky. But that's not
the same thing as starting out narcissistic. You know, we talked about Snow White. Before she could
find a prince, she had to learn to be of service to the dwarves. But that's worth thinking about.
Now, you might think, well, why should we pay attention to a
fairy tale? It's like, well, how about because people remembered it for 15,000 years and that
Disney just spent a quarter of a billion dollars trying to retell it and failed.
And so, and then with regards to the order of affairs in a woman's life. Look, I calculated recently that even an attractive woman,
like radically attractive woman, let's say, who often has her own problems, by the way,
because she tends to scare men away, right? A lucky woman has five potential partners in her life.
Five. You get five chances. That's it. Now think about this. Let's just think that through,
right? Because it's a terrifying way to think. So imagine that you're primarily looking,
say, from the time you're 16 at the lowest end to, say, 30. Because after that, it's starting
to get harder because the clock is ticking so desperately. One in three couples at 30 already
have fertility problems, by the way, which is
defined as difficulty conceiving within a year, even though the attempts are being made. Okay,
so let's say you got 14 years, something like that. Now, how long does it take to find someone
and then figure out who they are, especially if they're strangers? You know, before you're going
to decide to marry someone, likely you're going to decide to marry
someone, likely you're going to want to know them for a year, something like that. And so that's
five years right there with five people. But that also assumes that you go from one relationship to
another with no intervening space. So you're not suffering too much for example example when a potentially promising
relationship collapses or you don't get sick or something doesn't waylay you in your professional
career so imagine two years per relationship that's 10 years for five that's assuming that
people want to be around you so i don't know know if you're settling. I get the picture.
You don't want to lie to someone and tell them that you find them attractive in all possible
ways when you don't. But maybe you could start the bloody process with a little more humility.
I like the way you started that. What shouldn't the goal be to make yourself so attractive in,
just in heart and soul, not to mention on the outside, that does require some effort
that they're lining up, that they're lining up there. And if that's not happening, why,
why is it? You know, it's my, my favorite poem. Um, you'll find the fault lies in you,
right? Make an examination. You'll find the fault lies in you. It's called yourself to blame. And it's empowering. It's not about self-flagellation. It's about if there's something
wrong in your life, you fix it. And that especially starts with you, you, how you are and how you are
in the world. I wish we had another two hours, Jordan. I loved talking to you. Thank you so much
for being here today. Well, it's really nice to see you again. And thank you very much for the opportunity to
talk again. I've been watching what you've been doing for, well, for a very long time,
and you seem to be very useful and very successful. And what you're doing is very
difficult and it seems very helpful. So, you know, hooray for you.
Thank you.
Yeah, it was a pleasure
talking to you today
and back at you
okay all the best
and tomorrow
the fellas from
Ruthless will be here
we'll look forward to that
thanks for listening
to the Megyn Kelly show
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