CW: references to child sexual exploitation and transphobic remarks
Queues for Jordan Peterson’s talk at The Oxford Union stretched the length of St Michael’s Street, reaching the entrance to St Peter’s College. One Masters student told me that he’d been queuing since 5 p.m. for a prime seat on the members’ row.
Thirty minutes after the scheduled 8 p.m. start, Peterson’s entourage arrived to fill the front committee rows of seats. Among them was his 7-foot tall security guard in a green bomber jacket and matching baseball cap; a suave American who had the looks and briefcase of Vincent Vega; and a four-strong team of reporters from The Daily Wire, the right-wing media outlet founded by Ben Shapiro.
Committee members struggled with the microphone before President Israr Khan began to introduce the talk, and the head and shoulders of Jordan Peterson appeared in the glass entrance door. Rows of members turned their heads to a greying, relaxed man in a slightly ludicrous yellow-piped tweed suit. Peterson strode up to the front of the chamber amid raucous applause. The whole row of members behind me rowdily slapped the wooden bench, and one eager boy let out muffled shouts of “I love you!”, before remarking on Peterson’s “aura”.
Khan didn’t have much time for niceties, beginning proceedings by asking Peterson if he was satisfied with Netanyahu’s action in Gaza, citing his October 7th tweet instructing the Israeli Prime Minister to “Give ‘em hell”. Peterson suggested the question was “loaded” and proceeded to equivocate, suggesting there’s “no decent place to stand in the massacre”. He went on an enormous, unintelligible detour about solutions in a time of catastrophe, finishing with the question: “Who would be satisfied?”.
Peterson didn’t give much away on his stance on Gaza, although his attitude towards pro-Palestinian protestors is clear. He described the “absolutely atrocious manner” in which pro-Palestinian activists protested at Harvard and Columbia, and the “preposterously narcissistic behaviour” of students involved with encampments. Any warmth shown to Palestinian protestors, he believes, is part of a much broader issue of soft treatment towards left-wing agitators. Peterson went on remarking that “the left can agitate ad nauseam, but if the Conservatives have anything approximating a protest, we’ll have a fit about it and punish them as harshly as possible”. To make this point, he cited the “infinite series of Black Lives Matters”.
Khan then moved on to discuss the UK ‘grooming gangs’ scandal, asking Peterson his thoughts on the association of men from South Asian backgrounds with the crimes. Khan suggested that Peterson was wrong to associate South Asian men with the crimes, since “85% of suspects in grooming gangs and child sex abuse were white”. Peterson retorted by critiquing the statistics cited by Khan: the issue is not about the ethnic makeup of the grooming gangs, but rather the disproportionate number of South Asian men operating them. Khan didn’t have the relevant statistics at hand to challenge this, and Peterson was left to score an open goal. After the debate, a member said it “struck [them] how unprepared the president was … how did he not have proportionality statistics?”
Later, Khan once again failed to have the statistics on hand when Peterson claimed that the only notable explanation for his predominantly male audience was the fact that 85% of YouTube users are male. In fact, 55% of YouTube users are male. Even if Peterson had been right about the statistics, there seem to be more obvious reasons as to why Peterson struggles to win over female audiences.
Further in the talk, Peterson continued to support allegations that Keir Starmer—along with all the former Conservative leaders who didn’t act strongly enough on grooming gangs—is a “rape apologist”, alongside all of the former Conservative leaderships who didn’t act strongly enough on grooming gangs. There were sighs from the crowd at this point and Peterson, flailing slightly, exclaimed: “How many rapes do you need? How many did you have? Within an order of magnitude?”.
Before closing the interview section, Peterson spoke avidly against regulations on hate speech, describing them as “absurd” since “no one learns without pain”. Much to his own amusement, he then likened Kamala Harris to Dolores Umbridge, with both described as “totalitarianism in its maternal guise”.
Most of the audience members invited to the despatch box entirely indulged Peterson’s sophistry. One member confessed that she fears using Peterson’s name amongst her colleagues, concealing her Conservative politics, before questioning “How do individuals in an economy driven by wokeism survive?”. Peterson here remarked positively about free thinking in the Oxford system, since “collegiate independence gives guard against the centralised woke mob”.
Only one audience question that evening seemed to rattle Peterson. The question concerned Peterson’s previous associations of transgender people with satanic rituals in the 1980s, and his remarks that transgender individuals suffer from a “sociological contagion”. The member sought to associate Peterson’s purportedly transphobic remarks with the alarming rates of suicide amongst transgender youth. Peterson was enraged. As President Khan noted, Peterson evaded the content of the question and launched a vitriolic attack on the student, proceeding as follows: “You have no idea what you’re talking about… you really are something”I can’t imagine a sequence of questions more clichéd and formulaic”. Referring to the audience member, Peterson spoke of “female personalities that are particularly proficient at bullying”.
Jordan Peterson works in hyperbole and exaggeration. He racked up at least five uses of the word “preposterous” in just the first response. His style of speech involves an outrageously exaggerated claim followed by a series of supporting adjectives which then manoeuvres into a broadly irrelevant and garbled series of psychological-philosophical claims. He begins at a point of vague relevance to the question, before detouring along every possible chain of connected thought. It’s hard to imagine that these detours are intelligible to anyone except him. He’ll use a light-hearted analogy to win smiles from his listeners and then, in an instant, turn it into a grave, apocalyptic claim, as if to catch you red-handed for enjoying his words.
Khan began the talk by noting that the anticipation for Peterson’s talk “speaks to the type of intellectual discourse that Oxford is interested in.” Throughout the evening, the extent to which Peterson’s speech constituted intellectual discourse became increasingly dubious. By the end of the night, it is hard to imagine anyone feeling wiser. I left feeling three things: unsettled by his outburst, confused by even his more cogent moments, and disappointed at the weakness of questions from both the President and audience members.