Ku Klux Klan Cross Burning (PBS)
President Donald J. Trump (Newsweek)
Neo-Nazi and white supremacists march with torches in Charlottesville, screraming "Jews will not replace us." (Newsweek)

When the Southern Poverty Law Center says someone is playing to white nationalism and throwing out pseudo facts, I take their word. Few organizations have done as much to expose and fight racism in America. I’m a proud member and supporter of SPLC.

I haven’t given much thought to this Trump-loving Canadian intellectual, but after a friend (who has drifted far to the right) sent me one of his screeds, and did not understand why my interracial family is appalled at his use of the fake term “identity politics” to disparage people who fight for equality, I decided to post something that warns others about this very dangerous demagogue posing as a scholar. I’ve pasted the heart of the article right below this, but it’s worth reading in it’s entirety. As the British paper  The Guardian reports, he’s working hand-in-hand with neo-Nazis and white nationalists, by giving them a fraudulent intellectual cover. A lot of his camp followers think it is all just an intellectual game, and I guess as mostly white males, they have the privilege of thinking that words like Peterson’s, Trump’s and Bannon’s don’t have real world consequences. Fortunately, while all of us white males may look the same, we don’t all think the same. 

IF YOU DON”T HAVE TIME TO READ THE FULL EXPOSE, AT LEAST READ THIS EXCERPT:

(Kept British spellings, of course.)

“Peterson’s constellation of beliefs attracts a heterogeneous audience that includes Christian conservatives, atheist libertarians, centrist pundits and neo-Nazis. This staunch anti-authoritarian also has a striking habit of demonising the left while downplaying dangers from the right. After the 2016 US election, Peterson described Trump as a “liberal” and a “moderate”, no more of a demagogue than Reagan. In as much as Trump voters are intolerant, Peterson claims, it is the left’s fault for sacrificing the working class on the altar of identity politics. Because his contempt for identity politics includes what he calls “the pathology of racial pride”, he does not fully endorse the far right, but he flirts with their memes and overlaps with them on many issues.

“It’s true that he’s not a white nationalist,” says David Neiwert, the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. “But he’s buttressing his narrative with pseudo-facts, many of them created for the explicit purpose of promoting white nationalism, especially the whole notion of ‘cultural Marxism’. The arc of radicalisation often passes through these more ‘moderate’ ideologues.”

 

Click on the link below to read The Guardian article exposing Jordan Peterson:

“How Dangerous Is Jordan B. Peterson, the Rightwing Professor who ‘Hit a Hornet’s Nest’?”

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