Category Archives: Jordan Peterson

Eric Metaxas and “Letter to American Churches”

Discussion with Jordan Peterson

I haven’t heard of this author or his new book with the above title before but he sounds immensely interesting. Not least because he, having grown up in America, has a Greek (father) and German (mother) background. His mother having lost her father in the Second World War.

Here’s the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Metaxas discuss his most recent book, “A Letter to the American Church,” which argues a betrayal of faith by those who stay silent in the face of tyranny. They parallel the arbiters of speech across history against those populating today, and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that is intrinsically present in the Abrahamic tradition, yet increasingly absent in the American church today.

Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and radio host. He has written award winning biographies, such as “Bonhoeffer,” as well as children’s books like “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving,” Metaxas hosts Socrates in the City, a recurring popular event where he interviews writers and thinkers on theology, moralism, and philosophy. He also hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Show, more broadly referred to as “The Show About Everything.”

In the podcast (1 h 33 min, on Youtube here, on Bitchute here), Metaxas explains that in his new book he says that the American churches are making the same mistakes the German churches made in Nazi Germany. They looked the other way and narrowed themselves down to “thin theology”. Some did speak up, but not until it was too late to achieve anything meaningful.

(I would add that this “letter” should be addressed to churches “in the American Empire”, which includes the UK and all of Europe.)

Another thing he says is that churches that defied the Covid measures and stayed open during lockdowns “increased four to fivefold”, while those that locked down “withered”.

I can certainly believe that.

He has an amazing personal conversion story that involves a dream, at the age of 25, about picking a golden fish out of the water. He knew in the dream that the fish is Christ.

He has previously written an impressive number and range of books, including biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. According to Wikipedia, the latter was “the companion book to the 2006 film [on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace].”

In 2021, he published a book titled “Is Atheism Dead?” and last year the aforementioned “Letter to American Churches.”

How Marxism evolved

Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay discuss

From the video (1 h 50 min) description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. James Lindsay break down how Marxism evolved from a singular ideology into a genus, spawning many oppressor/oppressed dogmas across modern culture such as equity, critical race theory, and queer theory. They trace these sub-Marxist doctrines back past fundamental narrative into the theological realm, and detail their utility in the acquisition of power. Dr. Peterson and Dr. Lindsay also discuss the Grievance Studies Affair, of which Dr. Lindsay was a co-author and which casts a spotlight on the Marxist capture of our academic and scientific institutions.

An author, mathematician, and political commentator, Dr. James Lindsay has written eight books spanning a range of subjects including education, postmodern theory, and critical race theory. Dr. Lindsay is the founder of New Discourses, an organization dedicated to shining the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. Dr. Lindsay is the co-author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody” and the author of “Race Marxism,” as well as, “The Marxification of Education.” Dr. Lindsay has been a featured guest on Fox News, Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, and NPR, and he has spoken at the Oxford Union and the EU Parliament.

See also Lindsay’s recent talk in the EU parliament.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

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Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

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Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

Jordan Peterson’s ‘anti-WEF’ upstart is inundated with WEF-associated individuals

Writes Jordan Schachtel:

Celebrity Canadian author Jordan Peterson has launched The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new conference that he has branded as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos conference.

However, there’s one small problem with Dr Peterson’s initiative.

Many of the individuals he’s recruited to join the effort are currently or formerly associated with the WEF itself! And others who are not directly associated with Davos have a record of promoting the very same disastrous ideological dictates advanced by the WEF network.

Just as Dr Peterson was slow to the draw on Covid hysteria, he doesn’t seem to understand why advocates for human freedom dislike the World Economic Forum. Sure, Klaus Schwab and the gang are freakishly unlikeable statist sociopaths, but it is their top-down model of “governance,” coupled with their dictates upon society, that makes the WEF model so nefarious.

By seemingly copying the Davos model and rebranding it as a counter WEF initiative, the counter WEF has become just another invite-only conference of hand picked “experts,” vetted by like-minded individuals, who retain elite status within their exclusive, closed off networks.

This isn’t the path forward.

Humanity certainly doesn’t need an alternative group of mutually credentialing “experts” to dictate to humanity how they should be living their lives.

Discussing censorship on Twitter

Jordan Peterson discusses this with David Zweig

Video is here.

From the description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and journalist David Zweig discuss his role in breaking the Twitter Files, government censorship in society, the extent to which lockdowns were effective, how they affected children in particular, and how one renegade church would not bow to overzealous regulation.

David Zweig is a writer and journalist, with multiple books published, such as “Invisibles” in 2014 and the upcoming “Abundance of Caution” that centers on the effects of the COVID-19 response on schools and children. He was also one of the journalists who helped break the Twitter Files, focusing on the suppression of information to the satisfaction of the U.S. government and the public health establishment.

Chapters – (0:00) Coming up (1:16) Intro (1:51) The role of the media (3:25) How Zweig joined the Twitter Files team (5:02) Parameters of the investigation (6:00) Determining relevance (9:39) Why Zweig chose to tackle lockdowns (14:13) Having solid stories turned down (18:44) Bari Weiss, willing to listen (21:53) What the suppression of voices on Twitter means (26:23) Public trust in vaccines before the pandemic (30:45) The biological parallel (33:00) Overt focus on the pathogen left us blind to the side effects of our response (35:43) “Stay in your lane” (30:42) The problem of having too many options (41:58) Why we have natural, inalienable rights (47:55) Early data that was completely ignored (49:52) Weighing risk against value (53:45) An astonishing lack of curiosity (54:40) The evidence based hierarchy: where expert opinion ranks (57:30) The censorship at Twitter exposed (1:00:25) Some censorship is not unreasonable (1:01:03) Psychology of troll behavior (1:03:09) The few can corrupt the whole (1:05:22)The job of a journalist is NOT to draw the line (1:07:26) Authoritarian information control (1:13:43) Confusing a model with actual data (1:14:52) The error in “techno-solutionism” (1:18:07) The places that stayed closed and those left outside (1:22:22) Critical well being dispensed over assumptions (1:25:10) Asking questions makes YOU the pathogen (1:27:08) Spying on church members, millions in fines (1:31:50) Rapidly diminishing returns across time (1:33:30) The truly affected are those who lost their support systems

Thinking and Thanking

Are etymologically related

Listening to a discussion led by Jordan Peterson about Exodus, I heard someone point out (they were talking about prayer) that “thinking” and “thanking” are etymologically related.

I found that confirmed in the online etymology dictionary, here and here:

Old English þencan is the causative form of the distinct Old English verb þyncan “to seem, to appear” (past tense þuhte, past participle geþuht), from Proto-Germanic *thunkjan (source also of German dünken, däuchte). Both are from PIE *tong- “to think, feel” which also is the root of thought and thank.

(PIE I assume stands for “Proto-Indo-European“.)

So, maybe the first thoughts we became aware of were thoughts of gratitude.